Come hell or high water: How three friends survived a shipwreck and a shark attack in the Gulf of Mexico

As a maiden voyage, the first trip on Paul Le’s newly purchased fishing boat didn’t go much better than the Titanic’s: The vessel ended up on the bottom of the ocean, with Le and his friends hanging for dear life off the sides of two floating coolers in the tumbling waves of the Gulf of Mexico.And their chances of surviving that maritime ordeal? Not good. “Once the boat went down, the Coast Guard estimated the chances of finding the men in the water was less than 1%,” says Michael Tougias, author of “In Deep Water: A True Story of Sharks, Survival, and Courage” (St.Martin’s Press, June 23).Tougias is best known as an author of stories of ocean survival and rescues at sea.

An avid ocean fisherman himself, when he heard Le’s tale he knew he had his next book.“The story had all the twists and turns and drama I’d been looking for,” Tougias says.It all went down on October 8, 2022.Le was a realtor living in New Orleans, a second-generation Vietnamese-American who loved to fish.

But having no boat of his own, Le only got out to deep Gulf waters to chase his favored red snappers when invited by someone else. That changed with his purchase of a used 24-foot, center-console Pro-Line. “Finally,” Le thought, “my own boat large enough to reach the good fishing at the offshore oil platforms.”He headed out that day with life-long friends Sonny and Lu, but the three men had very little luck: They mostly struck out when it came to reeling in fish.Then almost anything that could go wrong on an ocean voyage went wrong.After traveling about ten miles into the Gulf of Mexico off the Louisiana coast, for unknown reasons the boat began to take on water — worse, it was happening below decks, where it wasn’t initially seen. But after the leak was discovered Le immediately understood the danger, aiming the boat back toward the coast and speeding toward safety.

Then a wave swamped the low-riding vessel and the engines died. “We have a problem,”...