Scott Thompson has a seal to thank for saving his life. In early 2022, the urchin diver slipped overboard and ended up in the Santa Barbara Channel wearing only shorts and a t-shirt while his boat drifted away.
“I was taught by the best urchin divers in the business about safety, but for whatever reason, I was careless,” he wrote in a blog post for Sour Milk.
Thompson is a strong swimmer but became overwhelmed in the choppy, cold water and began to panic.
“It really didn’t take too long to realize like, ‘It’s getting farther, I’m not getting closer,'” he told KABC-TV. “I thought to myself, ‘Great, this is how I’m going to die.'”
That’s when he met a friendly harbor seal just in time. The little creature gave him the encouragement he needed to keep swimming.
“The seal would go underwater, and he came up and nudged me. Like a dog comes up and nudges your leg,” Thompson told KABC. “Did it know, like, ‘Hey, this human is in trouble, hey, keep going, dude’?”
After five hours, Thompson finally made it to an oil platform and pulled himself up onto it.
“The crew took it from there and got Scott the medical attention he desperately needed,” his family friend wrote on a GoFundMe page.
Thompson is going to be okay. – WTF Fun Facts