A 67-year-old Virginia kayaker who vanished on a solo trip in the Florida Everglades has been found alive after authorities unlocked and downloaded his last GPS data point from his cellphone after it washed up on the shoreline. Mark Miele had gone on the camping trip alone on Jan. 22 and his family raised the alarm when he failed to return on Jan. 29 as planned. The Collier County Sheriff’s Office searched an area near where Miele had applied for permission to camp in the rough and found his wallet and cellphone, from which they were able to download his last location on his GPS tracker before his phone went dead. Over the weekend, they started aerially searching the area where he had last turned on his phone and spotted him covered in mud but wearing a yellow life jacket, floating in shallow water. He was in a backwater bay area more than a mile from the closest marked trail and about two miles from where his phone was found. When rescue boats arrived, he was convulsing from hypothermia but had remarkably avoided being eaten by alligators, pythons or other predators. His canoe was found partially submerged under thick mangroves.
Read it at Miami Herald
