On June 12 around 11 a.m., Staff Sgt. William Au, 6 SFS Marine Patrol crew lead, and his partner, Airman 1st Class Kade Jones, were looking out at the water when Au said he felt a gut feeling telling him to patrol the water.
“We couldn’t even tell you what made us go out there,” said Au in a press release from the MacDill Air Force Base that came out July 13. “It was the weirdest thing. We just knew we had to go.”
According to the release, a recent tropical storm had made the waves swell higher than normal, and the U.S. Coast Guard had put out a “small craft advisory.” When the airmen took out a patrol boat and began to sweep the Tampa Bay water, they quickly noticed a pontoon boat that had capsized.
The release said that eight people were clinging to the boat, which had been flipped upside down in the water. Not long after, Jones realized that there was a 10-to-12-foot bull shark circling the pontoon.
Au said that the people in the water “were clinging on to the wreckage. They were terrified.”
After another boat arrived at the scene, airmen began rescuing the eight victims from the water. Airmen 1st Class Samari Rivera-Rodriguez said that the conditions during the rescue were less than ideal.
“The waves were so tall it was hard to see where they were. The waves just kept coming up and down,” Rodriguez said.
All eight people were taken in safely, and Au said that he was extremely proud of the team of airmen who performed the rescue.
“It’s tough to train for something like that,” Au said. “We conduct drills on how to pull people out of the water and onto the boat, but when it’s rough like that something as simple as holding the boat in one place is extremely difficult. But the airmen killed it. Hours on the vessel, getting used to the ocean and its conditions and challenges prepared them for this.”
“My biggest takeaway after getting everyone home safe was how well the marine patrol airmen did. These are young airmen, barely 20 years old. Just watching them do their tasks while coordinating with other agencies, while simultaneously caring for the victims, showed how competent and well-trained they are,” he added.
The Coast Guard and the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office arrived within 15 minutes of the rescue, and the marine patrol unit and Coast Guard cleaned up the capsized pontoon boat, the press release stated.
This is not the only recent shark incident in Florida. This week, a massive great white shark that has been named Breton lurks across the state off the coast near Palm Bay, where it was most recently tracked on July 12. Breton is approximately 13 feet long and weighs almost 1,500 pounds.
Newsweek reached out to the MacDill Air Force Base for additional comment.
