A husband and wife who went missing off the Texas coast are lucky to be alive after being lost in the water for 38 hours, saying God performed a “miracle” to find them.
Nathan and Kim Maker of Oklahoma were on a diving trip in the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday when a harsh storm appeared and separated them from their group, another diver on the trip said, as KCCI reported.
“The rain was so hard that you couldn’t see outside,” said Lisa Shearin, who made it back to the boat before the storm got bad. “It stormed, and the winds were just atrocious; the waves were atrocious.”
While the other divers who were already back on the boat attempted to rescue the Makers, the weather conditions made it difficult. That is when a wave swept them away completely.
“A huge swell comes in and engulfs Kim and Nathan totally. When the swell rolls out, they’re nowhere to be found,” said Charles Owen, a relative of the couple.
“The boat was getting smaller and smaller and smaller until it [was] completely out of sight,” Nathan told ABC News in a Monday interview:
The remaining members of the group of divers tried hard to find their friends.
“It wasn’t like, ‘Hey guys, do you have anything better to do tomorrow?’ It was like, ‘We’re staying out, and we’re looking,’” Shearin said, according to KCCI.
After a couple of hours of searching in the dangerous waters, they eventually had to leave and turn the search over to the U.S. Coast Guard — which searched for a long and stressful 36 hours.
Hope was fading away once a day had passed with no luck.
“We determined that we were probably going to end the search this morning if they didn’t find anything last night,” Owen said.
However, the Makers’ family members said their prayers were finally answered when the couple was spotted flashing “SOS” signals with flashlights at a plane passing overhead — just hours before the search was to be called off.
“They take their dive flashlights and start signaling the SOS signal to that plane; that plane saw them,” Owen said.
A U.S. Coast Guard ship was called to that location and picked the couple up after looking for them for more than 1,600 miles altogether.
Nathan said he and his wife helped each other survive by tethering themselves to each other.
“Because our body temperatures were dropping, we needed to keep swimming, or we probably would have frozen to death,” Kim told ABC.
“He absolutely is the reason we are alive, just keeping our spirits up cause it would have been really easy to give up,” she added, referring to her husband.
“It was God performing a miracle using the Coast Guard’s eyes and ears and their technology, and that’s what saved them at the last minute,” their relative, Owen, said.
“Even when the swell came over, they found them; they were together.”
According to Shearin, Nathan and Kim “have a greater purpose, obviously.”
“God truly did spare them,” she added.
Both divers are expected to be alright after recovering from minor injuries in a Texas hospital.
“It sounds cheesy, but I really do believe we saw the hand of God that day,” Nathan said.
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