Ellie swam with all her might. A real race for life for a dog, a female with brown fur, found in the middle of the ocean in Fort Myers Beach, Florida, in the United States, more than two kilometers from the coast. His fate seemed sealed, but a few people changed that when they saw him while they were having dinner on a yacht.
“I looked out and saw something in the water and I started hearing ‘dog, dog, dog,'” Terry Johns, the boat’s captain, told local television station Wink News. The man said ocean currents are “pretty strong” at this time of year and it’s likely the dog fell out of his family’s boat without them realizing it.
Once on board, Ellie was given food and water. In an attempt to find out where it came from, they checked the microchip, but it was unreadable. So the captain of the yacht contacted Wink News to bring the rescued dog’s case to attention.
Luckily, her owners, Ben and Kathleen Baker, saw the news and immediately contacted the captain. The couple said they were on a boat trip and when they realized the dog had fallen into the sea, it was too late, there was no sign of her: “I felt a huge emptiness in my heart and I thought I had let her down a bit,” the woman said. The family searched for Ellie for two hours, but their boat ran out of fuel and the poor visibility due to the late evening reduced the chances of finding her quickly. So they had to abandon the search and returned home, really afraid that I had lost her forever.
The day he picked her up, Baker drove 40 minutes in the middle of a storm, but he couldn’t wait: “There she was. He was having fun and running everywhere. When we saw it, we were so grateful. It was a miracle,” Baker admitted.
As strange as it may seem, Captain Johns said this isn’t the first time he’s found animals in the middle of the ocean and recalled the time he rescued a dog from the waves and subsequently adopted him: “He became our mascot for several years, almost ten years. Luckily for Ellie, she also had a ‘little angel’ on her head that night.