A scuba diver who was lost at sea for hours on end captured harrowing footage of what he believed to be his final living moments before he was rescued.
Jacob Childs considered himself to be a ‘relatively experienced diver‘ on the day he went out with a crew in 2016 to dive off the coast of Queensland, Australia.
Childs was set to dive at the Althea Wreck, approximately 30 nautical miles north-east of Bundaberg, and was the ‘first one to hop in’ the water when the boat arrived at the site.
In an interview with ABC, Childs recalled ‘fighting the current’ in the ocean, and explained he ‘missed the rope’ which led from the boat into the water.
“I surfaced alongside to the boat. There was no tagline out the back for me to grab on to … by the time the skipper had thrown it out I was already past it,” he explained.
Childs began to drift and soon became separated from his crew, leaving him floating in the ocean alone.
An extensive air and sea search quickly got underway for the diver, but as the hours passed, Childs began to lose hope and decided to record footage of himself in the water.
The harrowing video shows Childs explaining that he attempted to ‘chase after a trawler’, but failed to keep up with the boat.
As the sun went down, Childs began losing hope in being found.
“So that’s it. The sun goes down they won’t do nothing. That’s a wrap on old Jakey,” he said in the video.
The sky continued to darken, making it hard to see Childs at all in the water.
He was in the ocean for more than six hours when, thankfully, a plane spotted him floating amid the waves and Water Police were able to reach him.
“It’s a long time to spend by yourself,” Childs told ABC.
To make things worse, Childs recalled being able to see and hear helicopters around him, leaving him disheartened when they failed to spot him.
“Then apparently there were a lot of boats out there but I didn’t see any of those … all I had seen and heard was a trawler which I tried swimming towards,” he said.
Childs was thankfully able to stay warm in his wetsuit, and by the time he was rescued he just ‘wanted a drink of water and a cup of tea’.
Though literally being lost at sea would be enough to prevent anyone from wanting to leave dry land ever again, Childs said he actually wasn’t deterred by the experience.
“I’ll be in the water tomorrow probably,” he said, just one day after being rescued. If that’s not resilience, I don’t know what is.
