A man has miraculously survived at sea for 18 hours.
Remarkably, the thing that kept him afloat through his hours in the ocean was a soccer ball lost by a group of kids 10 days earlier over 80 miles away.
According to The Independent, the lucky man - who has been identified only as Ivan from North Macedonia - was enjoying a dip in the waves off the coast of Kassandra, Greece, when powerful currents pulled him away from the shore.
After his friends alerted the Greek coastguard to the danger he was in, Ivan was declared lost at sea by authorities. But even while coastguard teams struggled to reach him, Ivan was not alone.
As the North Macedonian man fought to stay afloat, he was amazed to see a small soccer ball bobbing on the waves. It was later discovered that the ball had been lost by two brothers - Tryphon, 11, and Thanos, six - while they played in the sea on the Greek island of Lemnos.
Despite the fact that the boys had lost the ball ten days before Ivan went missing (on June 30), and that Lemnos is over 80 miles from where he was swept away, the ball had somehow managed to stay afloat until it found him.
And thank goodness it had, as Ivan found that clinging onto the buoyant ball kept him afloat even when his legs were too exhausted to keep kicking.
Eventually, a Greek Air Force helicopter spotted the castaway from above and rescued him from the waves on July 10, after he'd spent a whopping 18 hours at sea.
While he was recovering in hospital, Ivan's father posed for the press alongside the mayor of Kassandra, Anastasia Chalkia, and the hero of the hour - the soccer ball that saved his son's life.
In another miraculous twist of fate, Tryphon and Thanos' mother saw the picture in the news and was able to identify Ivan's lucky ball as the same one her sons had lost a few days earlier.
Per The Independent, Chalkia described the incredible incident in a Facebook post, writing: "I had constant information on the course of the rescue and am very happy about the smooth ending of the young man’s adventure."
"The young man found a ball that saved his life as he helped him when he got tired," she described, before moving on to thank all those who had helped in the rescue:
"Thanks to the port, the EKAB and the Kassandra Health Center, the air force, the Greek police, the fishermen's boats of Nea Skioni, the two boats sailing in the area, all the rescue teams and the volunteers."
We wish Ivan all the best with his recovery!
