John Deer's Shark Point Swim
In June 2022, an Australian solo sailor named John Deer fell overboard in an area locals call Shark Point, about nine nautical miles off Panama’s San Blas Islands, while circumnavigating the globe alone, and his yacht Julieta sailed away on autopilot with both sails up and the motor running. With no life jacket and no one knowing he was in the water, he chose to swim for shore, alternating breaststroke and backstroke for roughly ten hours through warm but shark-infested Caribbean water, covering about 17 kilometers in the dark as fish repeatedly bit at his feet.
Completely exhausted, he finally scrambled onto jagged rocks, slept briefly, then signaled a passing fishing boat with a T-shirt on a stick, and the crew took him to authorities, who later found Julieta wrecked and submerged on the rocks with everything he owned lost.