Bill Durden was on a roll. He’d just caught two good-sized groupers and tossed his line back into the water when he felt it snag on the bottom of his boat. The engine, he realized, wasn’t in neutral. Durden gave the rod a good tug. It yanked him right back, pulling him straight out of his flip flops, off the back of the boat, and into the Gulf of Mexico—25 miles from shore.

As Durden broke through to the surface—gasping for air—he watched his unmanned boat orbit around him on a path that moved further and further away. Locking his eyes on the white hull, he tried to swim back to it as quickly as possible. But between the motor, which was still running at three or four knots, and the wind, it was hopeless. Within minutes, it was gone.

The gravity of his predicament hit him immediately.

“I was like, ‘This is a bad, bad situation,'” he says.

It was June 1, the first day of grouper season, and just hours earlier, Durden, a 60-year-old FedEx pilot, had untied his 22-foot Grady-White from a dock behind his house to go out trolling. Down from Reno to spend a couple of weeks at his vacation home on Homosassa River, just north of Tampa, Florida, he wanted to take advantage of the clear, beautiful afternoon.

It would be 20 hours until Durden got out of the water.

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