A man survived for 16 hours in an air bubble inside his capsized sailboat in the Atlantic Ocean.
The 62-year-old French man managed to survive all that time before being rescued by Spanish coastguard divers in what they described as an operation "verging on the impossible".
The 40-foot (12 metre) Jeanne SOLO Sailor sent out a distress signal at 8.23pm on Monday (August 1).
At the time it was 14 miles from the Sisargas Islands off Spain's northwestern Galicia region, according to the coast guard.
Tracking data shows it had set sail from the Portuguese capital of Lisbon on the morning of the previous day (Sunday, July 31).
As a rescue ship carrying five divers set sail, one of the three helicopters sent to help in the search spotted the upturned vessel just as the sun was going down.
A diver was winched onto the ship's hull to try to find signs of life and the man inside, who has not been named, responded to this banging on the hull and knocking from inside.
With the sea too rough to attempt a rescue, they attached buoyancy balloons to the ship's hull to prevent it from sinking further and waited until the morning.
Two divers swam under the boat to help the sailor out. They found him wearing a neoprene survival suit and submerged in water up to his knees.
Vicente Cobelo, a member of the coastguard's special operations team, told a local station that the man voluntarily jumped into the freezing water and swam under the boat to reach the sea's surface.
"Of his own initiative, he got into the water and freedived out, helped by the divers who had to pull him through because it was difficult for him to get out in his suit," he said.
He was airlifted to safety and taken to hospital for checks but released soon afterwards as no health issues were found.
This almost impossible rescue comes after a cruise ship smashed into an iceberg in the middle of the ocean recently - but thankfully no-one was injured then either.
A 2,000-passenger Norwegian Cruise Line ship was heading towards an Alaskan glacier but was forced to make a u-turn after heavy fog caused the ship to smash into an iceberg.
Whilst some passengers were asleep and blissfully unaware of the events happening outside, horrified passengers caught on camera the devastating thud.
Such was the impact of the crash, the cruise ship was forced to dock at Juneau, Alaska, as experts assessed the damage made to the ship before recommending it be returned to Seattle for repairs.
