'Death Was Coming Little By Little' - Diver, 80, Tells How He Survived 20-hour Sea Ordeal

An 80-year-old lawyer and fishing enthusiast, who clung to a buoy in the chill Atlantic waters for 20 hours until his rescue, fought off despair by focusing on the finer points of the law.

"You have to defeat the thought of a milliard [billion] deaths," Ignacio Siberio told the Guardian yesterday, as he recovered at home after his ordeal.

Mr Siberio was stranded at sea after his boat drifted off while he was spear-fishing.

"I told myself: you have to endure, you have to endure, another hour, another hour," he said. "But you are hanging from a rope, you become lethargic. And if you become dizzy and extremely shaky, you lose your grasp of the rope, and you are immediately out. In the darkness, there is no way you can come back to the buoy."

In a saga that reads like a solo version of Open Water, the recent film about a scuba-diving couple stranded in shark-infested waters, Mr Siberio spent a night off the Florida Keys, his flippers grazed by passing predators, and his mind flickering between exhaustion and plans to strike for shore.

At dawn, Mr Siberio, who has loved the sea since he was a boy in his native Cuba, made his decision. He let go of the buoy.

"That moment when you release the buoy and decide to swim to land is not an easy decision," he said. "You are leaving the appearance of certain safety by the buoy to start swimming 12 miles back, knowing that if you don't see the land and if you are swimming in the wrong direction, you are helping to terminate your chances of life."

By the time he was spotted by rescuers on Sunday, he had been swimming for perhaps five hours, and was miles from his starting point. But aside from mild hypothermia, he was unharmed.

Mr Siberio's misadventure began around noon on Saturday when the avid diver took his boat out of the Tavernier Creek marina, as he does almost every weekend, noting almost in passing that the weather was rough.

"The wind was really dangerous because it was blowing from the land towards the ocean. It was the most dangerous wind," Mr Siberio recalled, but he slipped off his 23ft (7 metre) boat, and into the sea to free dive for grouper and snapper.

By the time he surfaced, the anchor had given way, and the Grady White was adrift. Mr Siberio swam after it, chasing the boat to the point of exhaustion. "The boat was taken by the Gulf current, and I would have had the same luck except that I encountered one small buoy, and I held on there."

Lucky number

The number on Mr Siberio's buoy - 731 - was the same as his birthday, July 31. It seemed providential; Mr Siberio waited for a fellow fisherman to pass.

But daylight fled, and Mr Siberio was enveloped in a moonless night. As a keen sportsman, he knew all too well the dangers of the sea, and he knew that the chances of rescue were slim.

He also knew that the elements were against him; in his zeal to get into the water, he wore only the upper part of his wet suit, leaving his body vulnerable to hypothermia.

"I thought that my chances were totally minimum, almost non-existent, but I had to think about a change of weather. If a north wind came the next day, I would try to swim towards the land going across the waves."

He also had to fight off despair. Mr Siberio used his lawyer's mind to stay alert, poring over the details of pending cases. He also thought about his wife, and how news of his death would devastate his family.

At several points, his flippered feet were grazed by bulky creatures beneath the surface; Mr Siberio now believes they were sharks, or maybe barracuda. He struggled to keep his grip on reality, imagining that he saw a light shining towards him, and that his wife's voice was calling to him from the deep.

"The worst part of all was the notion of death coming little by little," he said. "You know that everything is declining, declining, you become aware that there may come a point where mentally you are so debilitated that you accept the relief, and you take the death.

"This is something agonising because it is an idea that is coming to you little by little," he said. "It was a fight against the darkness, and a hope for daylight."

On land, Mr Siberio's relatives had begun to worry, and contacted the authorities. But with the boat adrift, the coastguard had no idea where he was. When the boat did turn up, it was 40 miles from where he had been diving.

Although Mr Siberio had won a number of international diving competitions in the 1950s and 1960s, he had never swum 12 miles in a single stretch and he was now after all 80 years old.

But he decided that to swim was his best course. He also decided he was going nowhere without his lucky number buoy. He still had it when he was spotted by rescuers off the Tavernier Key.

Despite the life-altering experience, Mr Siberio, who has a daughter and two grandchildren, sees little reason for change. He said his legal practice sustains him, keeping his mind alert and his body active, and that he would preserve the routine that has governed his existence for many years: Monday to Thursday at the law office, Friday to Sunday at sea.

"I have always been on the ocean. I love it. This will not change. The only thing is to be a little bit more aware of factors that can take place all of a sudden, and make a change."

In Mr Siberio's case, it may mean a rethink about going out in bad weather. "I have to at least develop some safety measures," he said. His wife Gloria said: "All weekend, he stays out there, six hours, eight hours. I go shopping, or to my friends, or to play bingo."