Two women who went out paddleboarding on Ireland's Galway Bay are alive today thanks to two things: a lobster buoy and a fisherman determined to find them. The cousins, ages 17 and 23, were apparently swept out to sea in high winds Wednesday, reports the Guardian. They spent 15 hours in the water, surviving a stormy night by clinging to a buoy they came across—all the while remaining on their boards. That's how fisherman Patrick Oliver and his 18-year-old son, Morgan, found them Thursday morning, reports RTE. "They were good," he says. "They were waving their paddles up in the air, they had us spotted."
Oliver says he calculated wind speed and direction to make an educated guess on where the women would have ended up, which turned out to be 17 miles from the beach where they were paddleboarding. The women, identified as Sara Feeney and Ellen Glynn, were taken to the hospital for treatment. "They were fairly shook but they were thankful," says the elder Oliver. Sara's mother says the family is "overwhelmed and grateful" to the Olivers, adding that paddleboards would "never darken the doors of our houses again," per the BBC. (More uplifting news stories.)
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