- Three fishermen were saved from swarming sharks by the US Coast Guard.
- They were treated for shark bites and hypothermia after their boat sank in the Gulf of Mexico.
The US Coast Guard rescued three fishermen stranded in the Gulf of Mexico after their boat sank and they were stalked by "swarming sharks."
The Louisiana men, Son Nguyen, Phong Le, and Luan Nguyen, had to fend off sharks to survive for 24 hours adrfit at sea.
The Coast Guard said they were "rescued just in the nick of time."
According to a Facebook post by the Coast Guard, their rescue team searched more than 1,250 square miles before locating them after their boat sank, clinging to ice boxes.
"All three men had been fending off hypothermia and swarming sharks for over 24 hours, and time was running out," the Coast Guard said on Facebook.
A statement from the US Coast Guard said that the men were treated for shark bites and hypothermia. All three were taken to the University Medical Center in New Orleans.
Detailing the injuries to NBC's Today, Lt. Katy Caraway, US Coast Guard Air Station New Orleans co-pilot, said the men "had multiple lacerations on their hand, almost down to the bone, indicative of a shark bite and serrated edges indicative of a shark's tooth puncturing their hands."
The trio was saved when one of them found some cell service in the middle of the ocean.
With just 2% battery remaining, the struggling seaman was able to send "a screenshot of an Apple Maps picture with his geolocation in it to his friend, but no information as far as his [precise] position," Lt. Commander Kevin Keefe told The Washington Post. "So we were basically just looking at a map with a red dot on it," he said.
Despite the improbability of finding the men with such little information, a moment of joy flooded the Coastguard search and rescue helicopter when they saw the men floating in the ocean who were fending themselves from four-feet-long blacktip sharks, according to The Post.
Caraway described the mission as an "extraordinarily fortunate, once-in-a-lifetime search-and-rescue effort." She told The Post: "There is no clear way to quantify how many of these missions are successful and how many aren't, but I would say that this one is pretty special not only because it was successful but because the likelihood of finding them was probably very small."
Lt. Commander Kevin Keefe told Today: "It's difficult for us to describe how lucky they were that all these things happened in their favor and ultimately, we were able to rescue them."