Drowning kayaker saved by floating tiki bar full of priests
"It was a movement of the Holy Spirit, that’s what I’ll say," said one of the seminarians on board the bar.
Earlier this month when Jimmy McDonald was out on a rented kayak on Lake George in upstate New York, he ran into a real spot of trouble when it capsized.
While at first he was confident everything would be okay – telling NBC Washington, "My pride and my ego told me, 'I'll figure this out'" – things quickly took a turn for the worse as his lifejacket, loosened by the tumble, came up over his ears and he started to think that may be the end.
"I thought I was going to die. I was absolutely powerless and wished I had asked for help earlier. I was waving my hand and asked God to please help me," said McDonald.
Screenshot: NBC Washington
However, in an act of what one could perhaps put down to divine intervention, a floating tiki bar carrying a group of Catholic priests and seminarians from St. Joseph's Seminary in Washington D.C. who were there on a break from a religious retreat came across the struggling kayaker.
"It was a movement of the Holy Spirit, that’s what I’ll say," said Noah Ismael, a second-year seminarian on board the floating bar.
The circumstances of his being saved in this particular scenario by a floating bar was ironic for McDonald, however, as he is a recovering addict who has been sober for seven years and helps others with addiction recovery.
“How funny is it that I’ve been sober for seven years and I get saved by a tiki bar?” McDonald told The Drinks Business.
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Comments (9)
This is the best story.
It's got everything...!
He could accurately claim that tiki bar saves lives 😆. He was very lucky!
This is a life lesson we should all take away from this story...
Thanks for posting , I love to hear stories like this .
The moral of this story could be that you should never throw the bathtub gin out with the bath water ?
The law of unintended consequences seems at times to have the oddest effects .
I was reading last night that comedian George Burns smoked an estimated 300,000 cheap cigars during his life time , and lived to be 100.
He did perhaps , to some extent, balance his habit with daily walking , swimming , sit ups and pushups .
If those catholic seminarians weren’t performing an in-depth and diligent study of the floating tiki bar purely for research porpoises only , the kayaker may well have been up schitts creek with out the proverbial paddle .
His life may well have been saved by the fact that Americans do actually have vices .
Revealed therein would appear to be a moral insight that could be written down and contemplated by seminarians from here to kingdom come .
😂
Wow...quite the story
Woof woof