"The waves kept coming and coming," Kim Maker tells Inside Edition.
An Oklahoma couple survived being stranded in the ocean for nearly 40 hours after they went scuba diving and were stranded at sea.
Kim and Nathan Maker were on a diving tour off the coast of Texas when choppy water left them lost at sea, leaving them to fight for their lives for 39 hours.
The trouble started after a fellow diver struggled to grab onto a dive line. Nathan swam over to help and the diver made it out of the water. Nathan and his wife, Kim, were no longer able to hold onto the dive line, were swept up by the current, and were left stranded.
The married couple recounted their experience with Inside Edition.
"The waves kept coming and coming and," Kim says.
Kim, a special education teacher, is nursing a severe sunburn.
"While we were adrift at sea, we both decided to keep our masks on so when the waves would hit us, it wouldn't get in our eyes," Kim says.
"Being submerged that long, you just get really cold and you're shivering so we started swimming sprints to try to use the large muscles to warm us up," Nathan says.
Footage from a Coast Guard plane shows images of the husband and wife struggling to tread water.
"We always dive with dive lights," Kim says. "I tried to shine it as best I could."
After 39 hours, help arrived as the Coast Guard boat came to their aid.
"There was a lot of cloud coverage so we had very limited visibility and out of the corner of my eye I saw a light flashing through the window at us very frantically," a member of the Coast Guard crew who spotted the couple in the air tells Inside Edition.
The Coast Guard searched 1650 square miles of ocean to find them.
Kim and Nathan consider it a miracle to be found alive.
"I really believe those guys were really the hands of God. I don't know how to explain it," Nathan says. "They were our absolute saviors when they reached out and grabbed us."
They say as terrifying as the experience was, it will not stop them from going out on more dives.
