For Carl Grassi, landing a 380-pound swordfish after a seven-hour fight on standup tackle was a tremendous accomplishment, but he surpassed that catch a couple of weeks ago.
Grassi and two of his Coral Springs neighbors and their significant others were running south of Bimini in the Bahamas when Grassi spotted a stranded scuba diver.
Had Grassi not seen the diver, the man and his dive buddy would have almost certainly died.
"It was really freaky," Grassi said.
What made it so were the decisions that led to the divers getting into trouble and led to Grassi and his friends finding them.
Grassi and his wife, Kristin, Chase Greene and his wife, Adriana, and Adam Baker and his girlfriend, Nikole Martz, had taken Baker's boat to Bimini for a couples weekend. Before heading home, they decided to do some free diving for lobsters and snappers at a spot known as Turtle Rock a few miles south of Bimini.
"When we got there, the current was ripping. It was maybe 5 mph," Grassi said. "We were in the water five minutes and we got out because it was too dangerous."
Grassi suggested they head another 10 or so miles south to a spot with less current where they could free dive and have lunch.
As Baker headed there, Grassi's wife asked why they had gotten out of the water. Grassi told her of the time he dove in a strong current there and had to "swim like crazy" just to get to a rock that he could climb on to get out of the current and be picked up by the boat.
"It was pretty scary," said Grassi of the experience. "I no sooner get done telling the story and on the horizon I see something in the water a quarter of a mile away. We're not even two miles south of Turtle Rock.
"I said, 'Adam, turn this way.' Then I see it's a guy and he's waving his arm, so we head over. He was wearing a BC and he's holding a BC."
The men asked about the extra BC and the diver said his partner had taken it off so he could swim to their boat.
"We said, 'What boat?' Their boat was a mile and a half to a mile and three-quarters away," Grassi said.
After giving the diver Gatorade to drink and making sure he was OK, Grassi and his friends began searching for the other diver, veering left and right towards the divers' boat.
"Half a mile into the search, we found his buddy waving a fin in the air," Grassi said. "Because he wasn't wearing his BC, the only things sticking out of the water were his head and his fin. When that guy got into our boat, he was shaking."
The men, who looked to be in their late 50s and had been stranded for an hour and a half, said they'd been diving for 25 years.
They had anchored their boat and made their dive, but instead of following the anchor line back to the boat, they came up a quarter of a mile behind the boat.
The strong current pushed them farther away and they didn't have enough air in their tanks to submerge and swim to the boat.
After the divers watched three boats drive by without seeing them, the one diver decided to try to swim to their boat with just his mask and fins; he wasn't diving with a snorkel, which made his swim attempt exponentially more difficult.
"It's just little things like that," Grassi said, "that make a bad situation worse."
After the men had more water and Gatorade, they got back in their boat. As Baker pulled away, Grassi looked back and saw them hugging each other and crying.
"They were just thankful to be alive," said Grassi, who was thankful his training as a fisherman enabled him to save the day.
"When I'm running, I'm always looking in the water. You might find something good or you might find something bad."
