The men's fishing trip went awry when their boat sank 25 miles from shore. They clung to a makeshift raft of floating coolers before the Coast Guard rescued them.
The Coast Guard rescued three men stranded for over 24 hours at sea after their boat sank off the coast of Louisiana.
“As we were pulling them out of the water, there were sharks harassing them and they had told us they had been fighting off sharks for a while,” Seaman Andrew Stone said.
The fishing trip went awry when the men’s boat sank 25 miles from shore.
Even as they struggled to stay afloat, they shot video of their makeshift life-raft made out of two coolers. For 28 hours, the three men clung on.
With just 2% of his cellphone battery left, Phong Le managed to send a GPS image of his location to a friend before the phone died. Le said the phone had been submerged for over 20 hours and still worked.
Two hours later, the Coast Guard found them and hauled two of them aboard the rescue vessel. The third man was airlifted into the chopper. All three were treated for hypothermia inside the helicopter.
Luan Nguyen has lacerations and scratches on his hands from the shark bites. A photo of a tattered life vest shows what was left after a shark took a bite out of it.
Understandably, the men say it will be a long time before they go out to sea again.
