Overnight Ordeal Ends With Daring Hoist

Survival at sea is a race against time and cold; in Southern California, a 53-year-old jet skier won that race because he wore flotation, rescuers moved fast, and the Coast Guard fused air, sea, and shore assets into a coherent overnight search that ended with a daylight hoist and a living patient.

At a Glance

A 53-year-old man who fell from a jet ski off Long Beach was found alive late the next morning, miles off Seal Beach Pier.
The U.S. Coast Guard located him by helicopter and completed the hoist; he was conscious, hypothermic, and later reported stable.
Local agencies launched the search around 10 p.m. after multiple 911 calls; one other rider was rescued near the breakwater overnight.
The case illustrates how flotation, rapid reporting, and coordinated air-sea operations drive survival odds in coastal waters.

A precise chain of events: from 911 calls to a daylight hoist

The picture that emerges from the overlapping accounts is straightforward and, on the outcome, uncontested. Late Sunday, emergency lines lit up: a group ride off Long Beach had gone wrong, and two people on jet skis were reported in trouble. Long Beach Fire Department units, the Coast Guard, and local police launched an immediate search. Within the first hour, a good Samaritan heard cries for help near the Long Beach breakwater. Lifeguards and firefighters pulled a woman in her 40s from the rocks and took her to a hospital in stable condition. The man was still missing, and the search widened into the night as marine units found the jet skis outside the breakwater and crews pressed beyond it into open water.

By mid-morning Monday, the Coast Guard aircrew flying the offshore search lanes spotted what they were looking for: a single figure in a green life jacket, afloat a few miles off Seal Beach Pier. They marked the position, lowered a rescue swimmer, and completed the hoist. The man—identified in multiple reports as 53-year-old Paul Anthony Carbullido Jr.—was hypothermic but conscious and speaking, then transferred to shore for medical care and assessed in stable condition. A Coast Guard press communication placed the find roughly three miles south of the pier and the search at “more than 12 hours,” while local outlets variously described two-and-a-half to three miles offshore and a 12- to 16-hour effort; the operational arc is the same in each telling: an overnight, multi-agency search culminating in a helicopter recovery and a survivable outcome.

How these rescues actually work

What looks miraculous in a headline is, on the inside, a practiced choreography. Once a water rescue call hits the system, the clock starts. Dispatchers spin up a standard playbook: last known position, number of persons, description of craft and clothing, whether flotation is present, and environmental data—wind, seas, currents, water temperature. Local boats and lifeguard units prosecute the nearshore search immediately; the Coast Guard’s command center builds a broader plan, assigning surface assets to probable drift tracks and launching a helicopter to range beyond the breakwater and cover water quickly with sensors and the naked eye. The swimmer-hoist sequence—hover, cable down the swimmer, secure the survivor in a sling or basket, and bring both aboard—is the sharp end of that plan. In Long Beach, that script held: shoreline rescue for one, offshore air hoist for the other.

Two elements, more than any others, explain why the man was alive when the helo arrived. First, he had flotation. A properly fitted life jacket is not just buoyancy; it is a thermal margin, conserving precious energy that would otherwise be spent keeping the airway above chop. Second, the agencies did not lose the night. They built and maintained a continuous search from the 10 p.m. calls through the small hours into mid-morning—a cadence that keeps expanding drift zones on a leash. The Coast Guard’s planning tools explicitly model that trade: time in water, clothing and flotation, and environmental conditions feed a probability-of-survival calculus that drives how long and where to search. That framework, underpinned by validated thermoregulatory modeling, is standard kit for case controllers today.

Mechanics of survival: hypothermia, time, and drift

Southern California waters are not Arctic, but they are cold enough to sap heat fast. Hypothermia is not a cliff; it is a slope. In the early stages, shivering buys time. As core temperature drops, cognition slows, coordination degrades, and the risk of inhalation and cardiac arrhythmia rises. The Coast Guard and partner agencies plan around this physiology: get a flotation-confirmed subject out of the water before they transition from survivable hypothermia to a lethal spiral. The decision aid the Coast Guard uses—the Probability of Survival Decision Aid (PSDA)—rests on thermophysiology that’s been validated in immersion studies; it quantifies how long a person in given conditions can remain salvageable, and it shapes how aggressively to press the search across drift vectors and changing wind fields.

Drift itself is not guesswork. Controllers fuse tide tables, wind forecasts, and known eddies with the subject’s last known position to seed a search area that grows with time. That is why the helicopter’s find—miles from the group’s starting point but still within plausible drift from the reported breakwater vicinity—fits the pattern. Small discrepancies in distance estimates between reports reflect vantage and method: pilots report by GPS and chart; shore-based reporting often rounds to a familiar landmark. The survival truth is unchanged: without flotation, the probability of being seen and of remaining salvageable collapses quickly in short-period wind chop.

Who did what: roles and responsibilities on the water

Coastal rescues in the Los Angeles–Long Beach sector hinge on layered capability. Lifeguards and city fire boats own the surfline and harbor approaches. Police boats add presence and searchlights. The Coast Guard brings command-and-control, offshore-capable helicopters, and SAR (search and rescue) doctrine honed over decades. In this case, Long Beach Fire Department initiated the local response, rescued the first subject near the breakwater, and kept surface assets on the hunt; the Coast Guard coordinated the broader search and executed the offshore hoist. That split is not incidental—it is the design. It ensures that a call at 10 p.m. can translate into hands on a patient at 10:48 the next morning, even when the patient has drifted miles into open water.

The handoff does not end at the cabin door of the helicopter. Paramedics meet the aircraft, manage rewarming, monitor for cardiac irritability associated with hypothermia, and decide on hospital transport. Reports in this case consistently describe the patient as hypothermic but conscious and, after EMS assessment, stable—a testament to both the timing of the rescue and the controlled rewarming protocols that keep a borderline patient from deteriorating on the ramp.

Lessons that travel: gear, group discipline, and communications

Every successful rescue is also a syllabus. Three practical lessons recur across coastal cases and were reinforced here. First, wear the life jacket, full stop. It halves the search problem—an upright, high-visibility target is findable—and stretches the physiology in your favor. Second, ride plans and group discipline matter. Large group outings can mask individual separations; explicit buddy pairs, periodic head counts, and pre-briefed rendezvous points near fixed features (breakwater ends, buoys) reduce that risk. Third, communications and lighting are not luxuries. A handheld VHF in a waterproof pouch, a strobe, and a whistle are inexpensive, compact, and radically improve both your ability to summon help and rescuers’ ability to home on you once they’re in the box. The woman rescued near the breakwater was located after her calls were heard; technology can ensure those calls carry farther and pinpoint faster.

Fuel and route planning also loom larger than most weekend riders admit. Offshore trips toward Catalina tempt many—social media is full of dawn departures and dockside lunches—but the strait’s ferries, commercial traffic, and afternoon wind waves punish underestimation. Conservative fuel reserves, clear abort criteria if conditions build, and respect for ferry wakes and crossing angles are basic seamanship translated to personal watercraft. When a fall does happen, staying with the craft—if possible—and signaling increases both survival time and detection probability.

Why this rescue stands out—and why it is not an outlier

Calling this outcome a miracle pays a compliment to fortune but shortchanges the system. The success off Seal Beach sits squarely in the Coast Guard’s and local agencies’ core competency: find, fix, and recover a person in the water along a busy, current-swept coastline. The official Coast Guard communication describes a coordinated, hourslong search ending with a rescue a few miles from the pier, exactly as doctrine predicts when flotation is present and reporting is timely. Local reporting fills in the nearshore rescue of the female rider, the 10 p.m. start, and the patient’s condition on handoff—all consistent with a playbook that has saved countless lives in this sector.

It is fair to say that some granular details in public descriptions differ by outlet—the exact distance offshore, whether the search ran 12 or 16 hours—but those variations are normal artifacts of real-time, multi-source reporting. The operational constants are the ones that matter: initiation Sunday night, sustained search through the night, helicopter sighting around 10:48 a.m., hoist and transfer, survivable hypothermia, stable on EMS assessment.

Jet skier who went missing off Long Beach found alive after 12-hour search, Coast Guard sayshttps://t.co/NHdzpqjZk8

— ABC7 Eyewitness News (@ABC7) August 18, 2026

What to carry forward

For agencies, this case reinforces the value of rapid mutual-aid launch, disciplined air-sea coordination, and public messaging that emphasizes flotation and early reporting. For riders, it underlines the immutable math of cold water and the outsized payoff of basic gear and group discipline. Most of all, it demonstrates that when the system engages cleanly—from the first 911 call to the last turn of the hoist drum—people who fall into the Pacific at night can and do come home alive.