CAPE FEAR COAST, NC (WWAY) — Two days after being rescued 50 miles off the coast of the Carolinas, one man is sharing the story of how he and three others survived for 16 hours floating out at sea.
Dan Williams is an experienced diver. With more than 30 years and hundreds of dives under his belt, Sunday wasn’t much different than a usual dive trip. The current was brisk, but it wasn’t something he hadn’t experienced before.
He went out near Frying Pan Shoals off the Cape Fear Coast with three other people — Luke Lodge, a diving buddy; Ben Wiggins, a retired Navy diver; and his 15-year-old son Evan, who also has experience diving.
After about a two-hour boat ride out to their destination, the four divers jumped in the water around 9 am leaving the boat captain and Williams’ two other sons on board.
“My son and I had a good dive. I landed on the reef where I wanted to be. I dove about half a tank, got lobster, got grouper, snapper. Everything was great,” Williams said.
Everything still going well as Williams ascended 85 feet to the surface. When he breached the surface, Williams says he heard Ben and Luke yelling from about 150 yards away and noticed the two had their emergency dive signal flags up.
Williams says the boat wasn’t incredibly far away, but the loud engines likely prevented the captain and his sons from hearing them calling for the boat.
“I blew my whistle. I put up my flag, waving it back and forth. I can see my kids going up and down the ladder. They’re all just looking in the opposite direction. They weren’t looking where we were at, they were looking where they figured we would come up,” Williams said.
Williams explained it’s not out of the ordinary to spend 10 to 15 minutes working to get the boat’s attention after a dive. However, 15 minutes turned into 20 minutes and 20 minutes turned into 30 minutes.
Despite their best efforts to swim towards the boat, they were only getting further from it.
The group came up with a plan. Luke and Evan removed all of their dive gear except for their wet suit and fins. Ben and Dan held onto the gear while Luke and Evan tried swimming toward the boat. After about an hour, they decided that plan was futile and huddled back together. At this point, they had been steadily drifting away from the boat for about two hours.
“At this point, we had decided that this was maybe going to maybe be a dire situation,” Williams said.
As they continued to drift away, they remained calm with hopes of the captain calling the Coast Guard. They decided to keep their eyes on the boat, stay as close as they could, and wait for the Coast Guard.
Eventually, they drifted so far that the divers lost sight of the boat.
“We never saw the Coast Guard come. We never saw a helicopter come to the boat. Probably 2 pm it was completely out of sight.”
Using their Garmin dive watches, they kept track of how far they had gone. After floating more than 10 miles away and around 3 pm, they decided to try to swim towards Frying Pan Tower. The divers knew they could access a radio there and call for help. Unfortunately, the currents were moving them in the opposite direction, and after about two hours they realized they couldn’t make the swim to the tower.
Around 5:15 pm, they saw the first helicopter. The group got excited and even felt some relief.
The helicopter didn’t see them.
“We started praying. We all decided that everything moving forward was faith in God. All positive, because there was nothing that was going to happen that was going to change us from our belief that we were going to get rescued,” Williams said.
Just before 8:30 pm, they realized they would be floating through the night. While they were huddled together trying to stay warm, a shark approached them. It didn’t bite any of them, but it was “probing” Evan. Williams says this was not very reassuring for their survival.
As it got darker and colder, Williams says he worried for Ben and Luke because they started shivering, their wet suits weren’t as thick. Even though it’s summer in North Carolina, Williams explained after being in the water for 12 hours, it begins to feel cold because humans’ core temperature should be around 98 degrees and the water is not 98 degrees.
“We all huddled up very close, legs interweaved between each other. I had my dive buoy flag, it’s kind of like a pool noodle, I had it wrapped around my son and me so I could hold my son up,” Williams said.
They began to pray again.
“I knew at that point, there was a part of me…I believe deep down that was God telling me, ‘I’m not done with you.’ This is not…I have more for you to do for me. More in God’s plan to do in my life that this was not going to be it. And I told my son that. I said this isn’t it. God told me this isn’t it. My kid is 15, but let me tell you something…that kid…he’s a man. He’s a man. He looked at me and just said I know Dad. He told me too,” Williams said.
Around midnight, Williams says he is attempting to sleep. Though not easy because they were not wearing life vests, only buoyancy compensators which is a part of the scuba dive gear. He explained the compensators don’t keep you floating upright, so effort is required to stay vertical in the water.
At this point, Williams says they have floated more than 26 miles away from their original location. From his service in the military and experience diving, he began to worry about rescue planes being able to find them from the distance they had drifted — because they were only bodies, they were not in a vessel.
“I knew that the only way we were going to be found is 100 percent a miracle. 27 miles from where we were last seen,” he said.
After dozing off again, he was woken up by a wave crashing in his face around 1 am. He looked left and noticed a glimmer of light from a rescue plane. He turns on his dive light, using the strobe light function and flashing it toward the plane.
The plane turned toward them.
“There is nothing I could ever describe seeing this plane doing this low flyover when you’re at sea thinking you’re dead. This guy’s leaning out of the back of it yelling. It’s the Coast Guard letting you know that you’re going to live,” Williams said. “I have my son who looks at me with absolute trust and 100 percent secure when he’s with me, trusting me. That weight of that on me, knowing that we may not make it but he’s trusting me that we’re going to get him out of there, and all of sudden this plane comes down right at me. I just start crying. I just start crying and…thank you, Jesus.”
The Coast Guard rescue plane dropped an inflatable raft for the divers. After climbing aboard the raft, the divers were rescued by sailors aboard a nearby Navy ship that was performing an unrelated exercise. They were fed aboard the ship and the Navy contacted their family before handing them off to the Coast Guard to be taken back to shore.
“I came up the ramp — my youngest sprinted away from everybody else and came down. I just fell to my knees and cried. I told him I was sorry,” Williams said.
When asked how he is feeling following the incredible rescue, Williams summed it up in one word — “grateful.”
On Tuesday, Williams returned back to work to perform surgeries as an orthopedic surgeon. He says he has always loved helping others, but he will be making the most of his second chance at life by greatly increasing his efforts to serve others.