Dylan Gartenmayer said that he is lucky to be alive. That is an understatement.
On Jan. 19, Gartenmayer, 22, was free diving near Key West, Florida when the Gulf Stream current sucked him into deeper waters.
Several minutes passed before he was able to surface, and when he did, Gartenmayer realized he was almost a mile away from the boat from which he was diving.
“I was just getting dragged further and further, and I could watch the boat just slowly getting smaller. It was definitely, ‘OK, this is starting to get serious here, for sure,’” he said in an interview with his mother on January 25.
The young man swam more than a mile and found a channel marker where he was able to make a raft of mooring balls and wait for help. As the sun was setting, Gartenmayer, who was wearing a wetsuit attempted to prepare himself for a long night in the water.
“Watching that sun drop was kind of like making my heart sink,” he said. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is going to be a long night out here.’ That was my idea with the buoys, was tying those together and trying to get up as high as I can, keep a little warmth and put less of my body in the water for any potential predators.”
The Coast Guard was already searching for him, but Gartenmayer’s mother, Tabitha Gartenmayer, launched her mission to save him.
“It definitely had to be a miracle,” she said. “It had to be God protecting him the whole time, our angels above, because for us to land right on him, you could see it’s a needle in a haystack out there. He was so smart to get the buoys, to know that his head wasn’t going to be enough to find him,” she said.
Tabitha’s boat filled with family members ultimately found Dylan and pulled him from the water.
“Seeing them stop and just point right at me, I was like, ‘Oh, my God. They see me,’” he recalled.
This amazing story has gone viral after a cousin captured the rescue and put it on TikTok.
Tabitha shared about the moment she heard her son went missing in the ocean, ”It literally took my breath away,” she said while choking back tears. “I couldn’t even breathe, everything just went away.”
“This is definitely a miracle,” she said.
A family reunion unlike any other… After being lost as sea for hours, Dylan Gartenmayer was found by his family. pic.twitter.com/oipw2VaSoo
— Tamron Hall Show (@TamronHallShow) January 25, 2023
