Jet Skier Rescued After 11 Hours Adrift

The sun went down. The stars came out. And something with “a huge dorsal fin” sliced the water near him. For 11 hours, John MacIntyre drifted on his lifeless Jet Ski between Santa Catalina Island and the coast, convinced a search had been abandoned until morning.

Back home, the visions were worse. MacIntyre’s girlfriend, Gloria Morgan, spent a sleepless night imagining ships cleaving his tiny craft in two and sharks snapping at his limbs after he dozed off and slipped into the ocean.

“We’re just so fortunate that the weather conditions were as good as they were,” Morgan said Tuesday after MacIntyre’s rescue.

The 40-year-old San Clemente pharmacist was plucked from the ocean at 3:25 a.m. Tuesday by a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter out of San Diego. The helicopter was added to the search about 2 a.m. after Morgan’s incessant coaxing, she said. The helicopter, which can stay in the air for long periods of time, supplemented a search helicopter and vessel out of Los Angeles, a U.S. Coast Guard spokesman said. It paid off.

MacIntyre--throat sore, body aching and spirit humbled--said he never saw the other rescue craft. When the San Diego helicopter passed over him in the predawn gloom, he was sure they had missed him.

“They flew back and forth,” he said. “I was screaming and waving, and I did not have enough night signaling apparatus. I should have had flares. . . . I should have a hand-held marine radio.”

MacIntyre has made the solo trip to Catalina Island and back on his three-seater personal watercraft about a dozen times “without incident,” enough to get a little overconfident. On Monday, he motored to Avalon and spent about 40 minutes having lunch and gassing up for the trip back.

About 4:30 p.m., MacIntyre was most of the way home, with the Dana Point coast in clear sight. Then his craft stalled and wouldn’t start, a problem MacIntyre thinks was due to a weak battery.

He dialed a commercial marine assistance company on his cell phone, and they called the Coast Guard. But his cell phone battery soon died too. The one other call he made was to his own home answering machine, knowing Morgan would go looking for him when she discovered his Jet Ski missing from her garage, where he usually stores it.

The message said only that “he was stranded in the ocean and wasn’t sure where he was,” Morgan said. But this was enough to get her on the phone to the U.S. Coast Guard. She spoke to them every two hours.

“I know they had every right to stop the search, but they didn’t stop the search,” said Morgan, a sales manager in San Clemente. “They added the other helicopter. They worked really hard to get him out and safe.”

At 3:25 a.m., she called again, and U.S. Coast Guard search and rescue coordinator John Howk told her to wait.

“He said ‘Hold on, hold on, I’ve got a message coming in,’ ” Morgan said. “He clicked back on the line and said, ‘They just found him.’ ”

MacIntyre, dressed in a short wet-suit that left him shivering all night, was packed into what he said looked like a padded shopping cart and hauled up to the helicopter. A rescue vessel later picked up his craft.

“I’m 6-foot-5 and 240 pounds,” he said. “It was a very small little shopping cart, with the blast from the helicopter spraying all around me.”

MacIntyre and Morgan were both grateful for the calm weather conditions. The night, MacIntyre said, was beautiful.

“A lot of dolphins were out,” he said. “It would be nice to say they kept me company, but they kept right on going.”

MacIntyre, who vowed to take a partner along on a second Jet Ski the next time, said he “was more scared about the people who were worried about me.”

Morgan said she believes he learned his lesson.

“The buddy system should apply to every water sport, to every sport imaginable,” she said. “I always told him he was out of his mind, in a very nice way.”