Key West Diver Survives Gulf Stream Drift After Spearfishing Trip Goes Wrong

The Gulf Stream had been pulling Dylan Gartenmayer for nearly three hours when he heard a familiar engine hum rise through the water behind him.

Gartenmayer, 22, was free diving at Western Sambo Reef on the afternoon of January 19, 2023, when a powerful Gulf Stream current swept him away from his friends' boat near Key West. By the time he surfaced, the two companions aboard had no idea where to look. They spent roughly 30 minutes searching before calling the U.S. Coast Guard, which launched a multi-asset response by air and sea.

What followed was a nearly three-hour ordeal in open ocean water approximately 150 feet deep, with a reef shark circling nearby and sunset closing in fast.

Gartenmayer has been diving and spearfishing along the Keys coast since he was 10 years old, a background his family credits with keeping him alive. He is capable of free diving deeper than 100 feet on a single breath. Alone in the water that Thursday afternoon, he grabbed a bamboo stick floating nearby to stay afloat, then swam more than a mile across the current to reach the nearest channel marker. He could see Coast Guard assets running grid-pattern searches in the distance, and could see his friends' boat, but neither could see him.

Around 5 p.m., his friends' boat was forced to leave; it carried no lights. As the sun began to drop, Gartenmayer later described watching it sink as making his "heart sink," the prospect of a full night at sea suddenly real. He cut three mooring balls from the reef and lashed them together into a hammock-like raft, a move designed to keep his body out of the water, conserve heat, and make himself a larger target for searchers. He waved his spearfishing spear overhead to attract attention.

On shore, Dylan's friend Sean Caggiano received the distress call and rushed to the grandfather's house to rally the family. Within 15 minutes, family and friends had gathered and launched the grandfather's boat toward Dylan's last-known coordinates. His mother, Tabitha Gartenmayer, got the first call from his father Tab, who told her only that "something's wrong with Dylan." She later described the moment: "this feeling came over me, just like this, and I couldn't breathe."

The family found Dylan nearly three hours after he first went missing, approximately half a mile from where he had originally been diving. It was friend Joel Cruz who first spotted the cluster of tied-together mooring balls from the rescue boat. Dylan, for his part, recognized the sound of his grandfather's familiar engine approaching before he could even see the boat. Cousin Priscilla Gartenmayer, who filmed the rescue, described the moment the family's flashlight found him: "Everything was silent on the boat until the flashlight hit him and he put his hands up — we finally knew he was OK."

The Coast Guard arrived, checked his vitals, and transported him to their station, where he was found to have a low core temperature but was otherwise unharmed. His first request after being pulled aboard: water.

Lt. Cmdr. Elizabeth Tatum, Search and Rescue Mission Coordinator for Coast Guard Sector Key West, was direct about how close the outcome came to being different. "Too often missing diver cases don't have positive outcomes, and the circumstances of this case didn't forecast for one," she said. "Sunset, weather conditions and Dylan's outfit were playing against us in this case. But his foresight to lash mooring balls together to make him a bigger target in the water was smart."

Priscilla posted the rescue video to TikTok on January 20, 2023. It has since accumulated more than 31 million views. Dylan and his mother appeared on the TODAY Show on January 25, where Tabitha called the outcome "definitely a miracle." Dylan has said he fully intends to dive again.

His mother, herself a lifelong Key West native, offered the most telling measure of how deep the family's connection to the ocean runs: "I was spearfishing with Dylan in my belly.