Carl Garrett Simonsen got in his kayak on the Boca Inlet to fish. He left shore at 3 p.m. on June 22 and was only expecting to be out on the water until shortly after nightfall. Instead, he spent the night battling two storms and using a Coca-Cola bottle to empty the water from his kayak.

At 9:30 p.m., a fish bit the end of the 100-foot line he had cast in the water. It would have been his last catch of the day. But after trying to reel in the fish, he looked down and realized he had lost his oar. 

“Somehow my oar drifted away without me noticing,” explains Simonsen. “My kayak has Velcro straps that definitely don’t work very well, so I started paddling with my hands to look for it. It didn’t take long to realize the paddle was gone and I wasn’t going to find it.”

Simonsen could still see land and thought he could describe his location, so he called 911. And then his cell phone died.

On the phone with the 911 operator, he explained that he thought he was drifting south, so that’s where he was told that the Coast Guard began their search. But he was actually headed north.

Shortly after his call to 911, he noticed the clouds in the sky and was stuck in what would be the first of two storms he spent the night in.

Simonsen had thought ahead before leaving the shore that day and had brought a tarp for rainy conditions. He put the tarp over his head and his kayak to keep it from filling with water.

“It probably saved [me] from drowning,” he says.

Then the second storm came and he battled for several hours, emptying the water from his kayak with a 12-ounce Coca-Cola bottle.

The storm ended shortly before sunrise, and Simonsen rested as he looked for a ship that could save him from where he sat in the middle of the ocean.

A tugboat went past him, but the crew didn’t seem to notice Simonsen’s attempt to catch their attention. It was the second ship, a freight liner named The Monarch Queen, that stopped and picked him up. On the ship they gave him two bottles of water and some hot chocolate.

“That was probably the best hot chocolate I have had in my life,” Simonsen says.

The ship pulled in to the port at Riviera Beach mid-morning, approximately 40 miles from the starting point at the Boca Inlet. Emergency medical technicians were there to check Simonsen’s health and suggested he go to the hospital. He declined and is at home doing well.