The video that made Easton Barrett famous was only the beginning. His boat had just gone down in the Gulf of Mexico, leaving Easton and four friends treading water and thinking about sharks.
Easton shook the water from the phone and, seeing that he had only about 10 percent battery power, decided to say goodbye to his loved ones. He turned the camera on himself, smiled wryly, and said: “Well, the boat sank. No bueno. Love y’all.”
That was near the start of the five-hour ordeal, said Easton, who recounted the accident in a podcast interview with former Sea Tow captain Aaron Stasiak, founder of the popular Qualified Captain page on Instagram.
Easton said that he and his friends survived for one reason and one reason only: a personal locator beacon that one of their girlfriends had given them that morning.
“We realized the water was a little sporty,” said Easton, who briefed the crew before launching from Mary Walker Marina in Gautier, Mississippi, early Saturday morning for a fishing tournament. “We made a little safety plan—the life jackets are up here, flares are there, and the ditch bag is here with the PLB, or whatever it is.”
He had never even heard of a PLB. “Connor’s girlfriend had just given it to us that morning. She said, ‘Hey if anything happens, here it goes.’”
A PLB is an emergency transmitter about the size of a deck of cards that summons help anywhere in the world with the press of a button. It’s similar to an emergency position-indicating radio beacon, and works using the same radio frequency and satellite network.
Easton and the others didn’t give the device a second thought. They dropped it into the little yellow dry bag with their wallets and keys, and pointed the 28-foot Pursuit into the Gulf, as they had a hundred times before. They skirted north of Horn Island, then south of Petit Bois, fishing an oil rig and a couple of private reefs they’d discovered on earlier trips.
When they got to the second reef, the men huddled around the depth finder to see if they could spot any fish. That’s when one of the twin 175 horsepower motors quit. “All five of us looked back, and right away I was like, ‘We’re sinking!’” Easton said on the Qualified Captain Podcast.
The Pursuit was on its way to the bottom, fast.
“In a matter of seconds, our motors were already underwater,” Easton recalled. As the boat sank beneath them, Connor went forward to get the life jackets. Dustin tried to get the flares out of the center console, but the door wouldn’t budge. “The pressure just held it closed, and he ended up pulling the handle off,” Easton said.
In less than a minute, the boat was gone, and the five friends were treading water miles from the nearest land. Connor took the brand-new PLB from the dry bag and followed the directions printed on the case. As the boat disappeared into the depths, three coolers broke loose and shot to the surface, one by one. The men latched on to them, thankful for the added flotation and the drinks and snacks inside. They donned their life jackets in the water—no easy task in 5-foot seas—and locked arms. Staying together was paramount, Easton said.
“We had the PLB and the light was flashing, but we had no idea how it worked,” he said. “We didn’t know if rescue was coming. We didn’t know how long we were going to be out there. But there we were, just hitting the button.”
The men’s life jackets kept them afloat, and the water was a relatively balmy 80 degrees. They had food and water, and they were together. With their situation stable for the time being, Easton’s mind wandered to sharks—bull sharks are common in the Gulf, and great whites had recently been tracked in the area—and he was determined to give them a fight, if it came to that. He reached into his pocket for his knife and found his cellphone instead.
It seemed like a good time to say goodbye, just in case.
“I only had 10 percent battery left. That’s why I didn’t do a long video,” he said. “It was just something to ease their mind.” Easton planned to turn off the phone and close it in a Yeti cooler, where it would stay dry. When someone found the cooler and powered on the phone, it would automatically send the farewell video to his mom, Easton explained.
Easton recorded the message a few minutes into an ordeal that would go on for hours. “There was panic here and there,” he admitted. “The water was getting colder, so people were shivering because hypothermia can kick in after so long. We [were] in the water for four and a half or five hours.”
It was a waiting game, and even though it was the opening day of snapper season—one of the busiest fishing days of the year—for a long time, there wasn’t another boat in sight. Then, after what seemed like hours, Easton said, “Steven looked up and [saw] this little bitty glimpse of orange go by.”
The beacon had indeed summoned help, but the Coast Guard had responded to the position reported by the first SOS signal—not where they were, but where they had been. The Coast Guard boat passed out of sight moving east to west. Later it came back into view, going west to east.
The searchers had the coordinates of the SOS but didn’t know exactly what they were looking for. A PLB sends a distress signal, which could indicate an injury, man overboard, mechanical failure, or—more rarely—a boat sinking. The Coast Guard was racing from boat to boat trying to determine which of them had sent the distress signal. That’s the primary difference between a PLB, which is triggered manually by a person in distress, and an EPIRB, which is registered to a certain vessel and activated either manually or by immersion, such as a capsize or sinking.
All the time, the current was whisking them farther away. “We were drifting at 4.1 mph southeast,” Easton said. “We [were] going towards Cuba, and there [were] no islands in sight.”
If they had been able to get the flares from the center console before the boat went down, they could have signaled to rescuers from miles away. Likewise, a handheld VHF likely would have allowed them to communicate with the Coast Guard or possibly other boats. They had neither, and without cell service, their phones were useless—or nearly so. Easton tried to catch the sun with his to flash the Coast Guard searchers.
The 4- to 5-foot swell complicated the search. “You bob up and then you’ll see a little boat, and then you go down, and they’re out of sight,” Easton said. “What made me so mad is they’re looking for us and we could see them, but they couldn’t see us.”
The Coast Guard boat made several passes to the north of them, each time getting a little closer before going out of sight again. Finally it reappeared to the south, meaning this was the last chance for Easton and his friends. In a last-ditch effort, they lifted the 165-quart cooler out of the water for rescuers to see. It worked.
“All of a sudden, the boat came up to a plane. I’m like, Thank God, they found us. They found us, and we [were] all crying,” he said.
“I tell you, that was the happiest day of my life. I’d rather have that over winning the lottery any day.”
All five men were shaken but OK. The Coast Guard crew made a beeline for Dauphin Island, 17 miles north, where they reunited with loved ones. The next day, Easton set his farewell video to the theme from Titanic and posted it to TikTok, where it has been seen more than 9 million times. In the year since the accident, Easton has become a powerful advocate for satellite beacons, such as the PLB that saved his life and the even more capable EPIRB. In the podcast, he and Stasiak spoke about the importance not only of having a beacon, but also making sure that it is registered and that everyone on board knows where it is and how to use it.
“If you don’t know about it, you can’t do anything with it,” he said, adding that only he, Connor and Steven knew about the PLB that saved their life. “Dustin and his son did not know about the PLB on the boat, but Dusty had one in his tackle box,” Easton said. That beacon is now on the bottom of the ocean, which reinforces another bit of rescue advice: Always keep your beacon close at hand.
PLB maker ACR Electronics sponsored the podcast, along with the safety nonprofit The Water Sports Foundation. During the conversation Easton announced a discount code on the ACR website, StaySafe25. The code gives users a 10 percent discount on all PLBs, EPIRBS and accessories, along with free shipping.
