What started as a sailing adventure for one man and three of his friends ended in a dramatic rescue after his boat was sunk by a giant whale, leaving the group stranded in the Pacific Ocean for hours and with a tale that might just be stranger than fiction.
Rick Rodriguez and his friends had been on what was meant to be a weekslong crossing to French Polynesia on his sailboat, Raindancer, when the crisis unfolded just over a week ago.
The group had been enjoying some pizza for lunch when they heard a loud bang.
“It just happened in an instant. It was just a very violent impact with some crazy-sounding noises and the whole boat shook,” Rodriguez told NBC’s “TODAY” show in an interview that aired on Wednesday.
“It sounded like something broke and we immediately looked to the side and we saw a really big whale bleeding,” he said.
The impact was so severe that the boat’s propeller was ruptured and the fiberglass around it shattered, sending the vessel sinking into the ocean.
As water began to rush into the boat, the group snapped into survival mode.
“There was just an incredible amount of water coming in, very fast,” Rodriguez said.
Alana Litz, a member of the crew, described the ordeal as “surreal.”
“Even when the boat was going down, I felt like it was just a scene out of a movie. Like everything was floating,” Litz said.
Rodriguez and his friends acted fast, firing off mayday calls and text messages as they activated a life raft and dinghy.
Rodriguez said he sent a text message to his brother Roger in Miami and to a friend, Tommy Joyce, who was sailing a “buddy boat” in the area as a safety measure.
“Tommy this is no joke,” Rodriguez wrote in a text message. “We hit a whale and the ship went down.”
“We are in the life raft,” Rodriguez texted his friend. “We need help *ASAP.”
Raindancer sunk within about 15 minutes, the group said. Their rescue took much longer that, with the group out on the open water for roughly nine hours before they could be sure they would…
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