Stranded California Man Saved By Friendly Seal

“I thought to myself, ‘Great, this is how I’m going to die,’”Scott Thompson told ABC7 News. 

“Today is the day I’m going to die.”

Thompson, a sea urchin diver, recalls the fateful evening he set out on the Santa Barbara Channel last month.

All alone, facing a wide expanse of pitch black ocean in the middle of the night, Thompson fell off of his boat into the icy waters below. The boat then motored off into the night, leaving Thompson shivering in nothing but shorts and a T-shirt, miles away from land. 

Naturally, Thompson began to panic. 

“That’s when I realized, like, okay, we got problems,” Thompson said. “The panic set in. It was like, wow, this is a pretty heavy situation.” 

An experienced swimmer and diver, Thompson seized a single mantra: “Just keep swimming, you gotta get home to your family.” 

Thoughts of his family soon gave way to desperation and despair, however. 

“I was devastating myself, through my mind, just picturing my girls and my son growing up without me, and my wife, you know, not having a husband to support her…I wasn’t thinking about sharks or anything like that, until I hear this splash…” 

The mysterious splash was no shark. It was a friendly harbor seal. 

(Photo courtesy Pixabay)

“The seal would go underwater, and he came up and nudged me. Like a dog comes up and nudges your leg,” Thompson remembers, visibly moved by the memory. 

“Did it know, like hey, this human is in trouble?” 

Thompson believed the seal’s gentle nudge to be a divine sign. Salvation must be in reach, he felt, if only he could keep swimming. 

With a renewed sense of purpose, Thompson spotted an oil platform in the distance. It was far, but certainly closer than any land. Knowing it was his only hope for survival, Thompson struggled on, determined to reach it.

The seal joined Thompson on this fatigued swim, making him feel less alone in his desperate situation. 

After some five hours of grueling swimming through freezing waters in complete darkness, Thompson finally reached the oil platform.  

“It started getting brighter and I’m just like, I’m crying. And I’m like, shouting at the sky,” Thompson said. 

Once there, Thompson received aid from crews aboard the platform, and was eventually transported to a hospital to be treated for hypothermia. 

The tow boat crew that recovered Thompson’s boat couldn’t believe that he had survived. Thompson credits his survival to a higher power, in addition to the company of the seal.

“That’s when I started thinking, ‘Wow, I’m getting closer. I’m actually gonna pull this off,’” Thompson recalls.

“And then [the seal] was gone.”