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Australians find themselves stranded on mattress in Indian Ocean with just beer for company

Australians find themselves stranded on mattress in Indian Ocean with just beer for company
7 News/ Screengrab

Two friends had to be rescued after the blow-up mattress they were drinking beers on accidentally drifted much farther out to sea then they had planned.

With nothing but a cooler filled with beers and a dying phone, Jackson Perry and Noah Palmer were stranded in the Indian Ocean on Australia’s west coast for almost three hours.

The pair later told Sunrise, an Australian morning news programme, they had only planned to go for a quick float out last weekend.

“We just thought we’d go out and drift around on the water for a moment on the mattress, and then we realised the wind had taken us out,” Perry said in the interview.

“We couldn’t paddle against the wind and we just kept going further and further out. We only aimed to be 100 meters offshore, max, and before we knew it, we were out to sea.”

Perry said the pair called their friend, Texas Reeks, who rushed to pick them up on his jet ski only moments before their cell phones ran out of battery.

“All we knew is that Tex was 30-40 minutes away and we were just hoping he finds us because all of our phones were dying and we were kind of getting worried at that point.”

To stay afloat, Palmer jumped off the mattress every few minutes and re-inflated it manually while the duo waited for help to arrive.

After hours of drifting, Reeks finally arrived on a jet ski to rescue his friends and was quickly followed by a team of volunteer rescuers who helped bring Perry and Palmer to shore.

When asked if they had any advice to other people who enjoy drinking on floating air mattresses, Perry said to “definitely check the wind forecast before anything,” but expressed no other regrets. “Other than that, we had a pretty good time.”

Watch 7 News’ report on the story below.

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