Swept Overboard, He Spent 5 Hours in Water : Wet Suit Saves Diver From Icy Seas

For five hours, in the icy darkness of six-foot waves and high winds, Gustavo Pinzon dog-paddled, then floated “like a cork,” then paddled again, toward what he could only hope was land.

By the time the 29-year-old chemical engineer from Monrovia straggled out of the surf and collapsed on the patio table of a Hollywood Beach home in Ventura County Sunday night--as far as six miles from where he had been scuba diving off Anacapa Island when ragged seas washed him overboard--the Coast Guard had already been out for more than an hour, searching for his body.

“That’s what we thought we’d be looking for--the body,” said Oxnard city battalion chief Ben Wilkins.

And the 22-foot cabin cruiser whose engine was stalled out by the same waves that flung Pinzon overboard had beached itself not a mile away, with Pinzon’s frantic cousins still safely aboard.

“The only thing that saved his life was that wet suit,” which insulated him from the cold, Wilkins said. “He’d probably have died after two hours in the water without that wet suit on.”

As it was, Gustavo Pinzon, a native of Colombia, was treated for exhaustion at a nearby hospital and by Monday morning he was home, asleep in his own bed.

Miguel Pinzon, 33, said, “We’ve been diving for four years and nothing like this ever happened to us.” In their cabin cruiser, so new it hasn’t even been named yet, the trio, including Miguel’s brother, Carlos, 30, motored to Anacapa Island Sunday where “we only made one dive” before the weather pivoted from nice to nasty and “we decided to come back,” Miguel related.

“After the first dive, we saw the water was really heavy,” Gustavo recalled Monday. “We tried to take the anchor off, but couldn’t do it so we cut the line.”

The three--still in their wet suits and too hurried to change clothes--struggled to start the boat’s sputtering engine.

“A big wave threw him (Gustavo) out of the boat. I could do nothing. I saw him for maybe two minutes. We tried to get him out. We talked to him. He tried to swim to the boat . . . . He was like a cork floating there. . . . We thought he was dying.”

“I tried to swim back, but the boat was moving too fast,” Gustavo, who credited his childhood daily regimen of two hours of swimming for helping him to endure his ordeal, said. “They took a rope to throw me, but they couldn’t. Then they shot one of the flares. . . . I saw it, but nobody else did.”

After Gustavo drifted out of sight in the twilight, the brothers still aboard “tried to start the engine,” Miguel said.

‘But Nobody Saw Us’

“There was nobody around, not even a plane. All this time fighting, fighting, trying to do something, the boat was full of water . . . . It was terrible. We thought we were going to die too--big huge waves coming in and the boat like a little piece of paper.”

“When I saw the boat so far from me, I said ‘the boat is gone, I have to do it for myself,”’ Gustavo said. “I just tried to keep calm, to be realistic. Don’t be scared, be conscious of what I had to do.”

Gustavo said he zipped the hood of his wetsuit, remembering from his Coast Guard seamanship class--the final exam is Thursday--that he should keep warm. Then he began to swim--at times on his back, at times on his stomach, varying his stroke to avoid attracting sharks, and at times just letting the current move him toward shore.

“I would say, ‘Okay, I’m going to enjoy the ocean,”’ he said. “I saw the sky, the moon, and I said, ‘this is nice.’ then I said, ‘OK, let’s go again,’ and started swimming.”

But there were three times that he almost gave up, Gustavo said. The first, when the boat vanished; the second, when the sun set and he told himself, “‘I can’t do it. I’ll die. The dark is coming and it’s impossible someone can find me.”’ And the third, when the current changed, moving him away from the beach.

He sang to himself a Spanish song, “I am a Pirate and I sail the Ocean.” He prayed briefly and talked to his long-dead father.

Gustavo said he saw lights on the shoreline for about an hour. They turned out to be illumination set up where rescuers found the beached boat.

Straggled to Land

Sure enough, a couple of hours after the cabin cruiser nudged ashore and the Pinzon brothers had hopped out and began banging on doors to get some help for their cousin, Gustavo himself straggled to land, exhausted.

City firefighters helping Miguel and Carlos had already alerted the Coast Guard--which sent out a helicopter from Los Angeles and a cutter from Oxnard--when, more than an hour later, one of them overheard a Ventura County sheriff’s dispatcher talking about someone who had collapsed at a house on Ocean Drive.

When he reached shore, Gustavo recalled, “I said ‘I got it; I did it.”’

He knocked on the door of the first house he saw and said, “I need help.”

He was taken in to lie down in front of the fireplace by the homeowners. When paramedics arrived, Gustavo said, they stood looking at him like he was a ghost. Then one stuck his hand in Gustavo’s wetsuit and said, “My God, you’re warm.”

“He’s a real lucky guy,” marveled Miguel, adding wryly that Gustavo had reached land “the same way we did. It just took him a lot longer.”

And, after it was all over, released from the hospital about 3 a.m. Monday, it was Gustavo who drove everyone home in their borrowed motor home.