Missing Diver Rescued By Family

A Florida family leapt into action after learning that one of their own had gone missing at sea.
Dylan Gartenmayer, 22, went missing at sea for several hours after getting caught by the Gulf Stream current while diving off the coast of Key West, Florida. Around 5:45 pm on January 19, the Gartenmayer family received a phone call from a family friend who explained that Dylan had gone diving with two friends and had been missing for two hours.

The coast guard had been searching for him but it was getting dark. “We were told that he went down for a dive and did not resurface. So we were thinking the worst,” Priscilla Gartenmayer said. She and her boyfriend frantically took her grandparents’ boat out and headed for the last place his friends saw him.

Dylan said when he got swept away by the current, he spent around two minutes underwater. When he finally resurfaced, Dylan said he was about a mile away from where he had been diving — then he had to swim for over a mile to make it to a channel marker. And although he could see Coast Guard helicopters “out in the distance,” they couldn’t see him. He was ready to “fight the night out” and began tying buoys together as a makeshift raft but unbeknownst to him, his family was already taking matters into their own hands.

Priscilla Gartenmayer said “Before we even completely stopped the boat to start looking, Joel spotted Dylan near the channel marker that marked that reef,” she said. “The joy we felt in that moment is indescribable.” Priscilla’s boyfriend, Joel Cruz recorded the moment Dylan was pulled to safety— and a now-viral video captured their ecstatic reaction when they spotted him in the water and were able to rescue him.