Capsized Chicago Boaters Stranded Off Florida Keys for 22 Hours

CHICAGO (CBS)--Two Chicago friends whose sailboat capsized during a fishing expedition were stranded in the water off the Florida Keys for nearly 24 hours before being rescued.

Calvin Kuo, 58, and Phil McCloud, 68, were on a boat out five miles north of Marathon, Fla. when they decided to steer the boat a few miles offshore near the site of an old shipwreck.

That idea would end up risking both their lives and giving them the scare of a lifetime.

As they prepared to head back to shore around 5:3 p.m., high waves capsized their small vessel.

With the boat flipped upside down and all of their supplies washed out to sea, Kuo and McCloud clung to the bottom of the 16-foot boat all night as it thrashed around in the choppy sea.

McCloud recounted the harrowing story to CBS 2's Dorothy Tucker by phone from a Miami hospital Tuesday afternoon.

"Cal is a smaller guy than me, and I was at the back end of the boat and I was slipping," McCloud said. "I had to pay very strong attention during the time I was out there or I could've made a fatal mistake."

Around 8 a.m. Monday morning, McCloud got off the boat to look for any supplies that could've been trapped underneath.

That's when he lost his grip on the rope he'd been holding and began to drift away from the boat. He swam toward it for two hours before he lost sight of it entirely.

He was suddenly on his own in the open sea.

"That was kind of—I was nervous—because you don't see anything or anybody," McCloud said. "On all four horizons there was there was no land, there was no nothing."

McCloud started swimming, but

Six hours passed before a U.S. Coast Guard helicopter spotted him and pulled him out of the water around 3 p.m. local time.

McCloud said he feared sharks could be in the water, but he never panicked—and his FitBit proves it. He said his heart rate never fluctuated during the ordeal.

"I'm sore and tired and in pain, but I'm alive and I'm thankful for that," he said.

Kuo was found clinging to the boat prior to McCloud's rescue, the U.S. Coast Guard said.