As teenagers, Josh Long survived seven days at sea with Troy Driscoll. Now grown, Long looks back at their headline-grabbing odyssey in the ocean
Credit: Wade Spees/The Post and Courier; Joshua Long
NEED TO KNOW
- Josh Long made headlines around the country in 2005, and even ended up on The Tonight Show, after being adrift in the Atlantic for a week with his best friend
- Two decades later, he is amazed that people are still interested in the strange, miraculous saga
- He and his friend, Troy Driscoll, remained close over the years even as their paths to adulthood diverged
National Guardsman Josh Long can’t believe people are still interested in hearing from a “country boy” about something that happened to “two dumb teenagers” more than 20 years ago.
“Never in my wildest dreams did I think it would be a national news thing, technically global,” Long, 38, tells PEOPLE in this week's issue. “But obviously it’s a miracle story.”
And how: On April 24, 2005, Long, then 17, and his best buddy, Troy Driscoll, then 15, launched a 15-ft. boat with no engine or sail with the intention of paddling out a short distance from the South Carolina beach near their homes in Charleston.
Instead, a riptide sucked them away from shore. They were cast adrift for almost a week, with no food or water, as the Coast Guard searched, to no avail. “We just suffered,” Long says.
Driscoll ate dozens of gelatinous sea creatures — scooped from the Atlantic — for some meager sustenance. He and Long tried to resist the temptation to drink from the ocean and both licked condensation from the boat deck. Long caught rainwater in his mouth. (“It was more just like a tease,” he says.) For warmth the boys traded off the single wet suit they had and huddled together at night.
Back home, hopes for their survival dimmed.
“I didn’t want to tell people that I believed my son was dead,” says Troy’s dad, former fireman and Navy veteran Tony Driscoll. “But my training told me we were probably not going to find them alive.”
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Credit: AP/Alan Hawes/The Post and Courier
After a week avoiding sharks, enduring the elements and scorching sun and watching as passing ships in the distance failed to spot them, Josh sent up a prayer: Either let them die or let them be rescued.
“Not that I gave up, but I just knew that we had already exceeded that time of survival. I grew up with a bunch of outdoorsmen in my family,” he says. “I just knew that our chance of survival was dropping every day.”
The Gulf Stream had pushed the teens some 111 miles north, off the coast of Cape Fear, when a fishing boat crossed their path on April 30, 2005.
Credit: Alan Hawes/The Post And CourierBecky Baulch
When Ben Degutis and Rick Smith pulled Long and Driscoll from their boat, Driscoll told Smith that he looked like he’d been sent from heaven.
“It got to him as much as it got to [us],” Long says now, with still raw emotion. “A couple years prior, he lost his daughter and gave up on faith.” (The three formed a lifelong friendship until Smith died of cancer in 2022.)
The rescue shocked everyone, even their saviors. “At first I didn’t know what it was … and holy mackerel, it was two young guys in this tiny boat,” Degutis told PEOPLE in 2005.
In the immediate aftermath, Long and Driscoll found themselves at the center of a media circus: headlines around the country, a trip to Jay Leno’s Tonight Show, a documentary.
Credit: Paul Drinkwater/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty
“The little five minutes of fame, meeting celebrities and stuff, it was fun. But I tried not to get too carried away,” Long says. “I felt like I had a second chance at life. I didn't take it for granted.”
The teens’ ordeal bonded them even as their lives diverged.
These days, Long still lives near Charleston, working for a general contractor building gas stations, and has served in the National Guard for 17 years while planning on at least a few more.
He shares a blended family with wife AJ, 32: sons Joshua, 17, and Jacob, 14, from his first marriage, and daughter Jasmine, 11, who dreams of being an Olympic figure skater.
And yes, he still goes out on the water to fish — though he adds with a laugh that he’s “more prepared.”
Driscoll, 36, became a firefighter in the Charleston area and had a daughter, Mackenzie, 13, with a former partner. He’s avoided the spotlight more recently.
“I don’t have a lot of free time and like to spend it with [Mackenzie],” he told PEOPLE in a brief interview last year for this story.
Long says the pair “were inseparable but kind of drifted apart" in the last five or six years.
“He’s just doing his thing,” Long says, adding, “It's just how life happens. We'll always have a connection to each other. I don't know if anything will ever really separate us.”
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