YOU NEED TO KNOW
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An 80-year-old man survived 18 hours at sea after his boat capsized while spearfishing
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Ignacio Siberio told PEOPLE in a 2005 interview that the experience was “terrible”
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“I realized that the only way I was going to do it… was with my mind,” he said shortly after his rescue.
Ignacio Siberio was 80 years old when he set sail in his 25-foot boat about seven miles off the Florida Keys to go spear fishing. It was December 11, 2005 and Siberio was a practicing civil lawyer and skilled spear fisherman who often went out on the water with his grandson.
When his grandson couldn’t make it that day, he chose to go alone, even as the choppy wind and choppy water threatened to spoil the experience.
Speaking to PEOPLE a few months later, Siberio acknowledged, “I shouldn’t have been there.”
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Siberio thought in the ocean with his ferry, hunting for three hours before deciding to go back home. When he surfaced, his boat was gone – a casualty of a storm front that had blown away its anchors.
Siberio could see the boat in the distance — he tried to swim after it for several hours — but he could not catch up.
“It was terrible,” he told PEOPLE.
At that point, exhausted, Siberio began to walk on water, worried that he would “be swept into the Florida Straits,” he said.
An hour on the water later, however, he spotted five one-foot-long buoys floating together — swimming with them and holding on as hard as he could. As temperatures dropped overnight, he tried to relax, later telling PEOPLE: “I realized the only way I was going to do it… was with my mind.”
Unbeknownst to Siberio, his nephew and a friend had already begun a frantic search, enlisting the Coast Guard to take boats to his favorite fishing spots.
Early in the morning after he first parted from his boat, they found him: Siberio had cut the buoys and wrapped them around him. He was swimming towards the shore.
Siberio was pulled into the rescue vessel about 18 hours after he first realized he was lost at sea. He was then brought to his home in Tavernier, Fla. (refused to visit the hospital), and welcomed by loved ones led by his wife, Gloria, who was 68 at the time.
As PEOPLE reported at the time, the incident did little to dampen his love for fishing, and he had already been several times in the months immediately following.
“My lesson is that you have to be careful,” he told PEOPLE. “Fortunately I was able to bring joy instead of sadness by coming home.”
Speaking to CBC radio after his rescue, Siberio noted that fate seemed to be on his side.
“The buoy I got to stay all night had my date of birth on it,” he told the shopkeeper. “I was born on the 31st of JulyStand the buoy had the number 731. Can you imagine that?”
Read the original article on People