You expect a lot from a booze cruise. Stiff drinks, that’s a given. Shenanigans? Almost a guarantee. But you don’t often expect a boat captain and crew to rescue a bleeding, drowning Florida man who wasn’t even one of the passengers of the good-times vessel. 

A booze cruise boat crew jumped into action to save a Florida man and then celebrated with karaoke

Cole Kelly operates boats off the coast of Punta Gorda, Florida. Not fishing vessels or dive charters, mind you. These are good ol’ fashioned tiki boats. Booze cruises with fun and music in mind. Now, a booze cruise is many things to many people, but it’s seldom a rescue boat in an emergency.

Kelly and crew were facilitating one of those silly, sloppy booze cruises when they noticed a man fighting to stay afloat in the water. “As we got closer, we saw the commotion on shore,” the boat captain recounted to WLKY. But this wasn’t a drunk patron falling overboard. No, it was a drunk Florida man who had taken a spill over a railing and hit a rock in an attempt to reach the water. He was bleeding pretty badly, and likely didn’t have much time before he drowned.

According to Kelly, the crew and passengers came together to throw a life preserver out to the man and encourage him to grab it. They then pulled the man in and tended to him with the booze cruise boat’s first aid kit. “He wasn’t very talkative at all. He wasn’t very coherent either. He was very intoxicated,” Kelly told interviewers.

Kelly dismissed people calling him a hero after the event. “I was in the right place at the right time. And I feel like when I see someone in need, I have a responsibility to help them out.” Well, Kelly, the world might be a better place if more people felt that way.

Although the crew’s heroics didn’t stop there. After they “scrubbed the blood off the boat,” the patrons got back to the party. “We sang some awesome karaoke, Kelly said. “We still had a phenomenal sunset.”