a horse saddles up alongside a boat nearly 3 miles offshore, an unusual deep sea rescue that causes unbridled relief. this horse is something different than i ve seen in all my years of breeding horses. may 15th, 2012, summerland beach, near santa barbara. william, a beautiful 7-year-old arabian show horse, is asked to be one of a select group of horses for an afternoon photo shoot workshop. he s there with his trainer, jim lowe. if you envision an arabian and what people talk about an arabian, they have a picture of a white horse with a scoopy head, tail, prominent withers, sharp ears, large nostrils. william is almost a stamp of that. it s william s first time at the shore, and as jim finds out,
she said to me, mindy kendall s horse is going to die. and i was like, what? william actually belongs to mindy s 14-year-old daughter kendall, who just got him a few months ago and witnesses him swim away. you know, horses can swim, but they re not great swimmers. that s not their forte. that s for fish. i thought, well, there are sharks, and i knew this great white shark was in this area two days before and attacked a kayak. william is getting farther and farther away, eventually swimming out of view from everyone on shore. local water rescue agencies are notified of william s predicament and several watercraft are dispatched to search for the elusive arabian sea horse. santa barbara harbor patrol officer ryan kelly is part of the search team. in order to find him, it was just a matter of taking conditions into account and start a search pattern like for a man overboard. two hours pass and william is still lost at sea.
william is checked for hypothermia and is not seriously injured. in fact, a little more than a month after his ordeal, william and kendall are competing at the earl warren show grounds in santa barbara. kendall s proud father is renowned film producer john peters. when they go in that show, they re bonding together, these two. lights are on them, there s distracting, people yelling and screaming. the family is happy to have william back safe and sound. and officer kelly s family watches william in action, this time on land. thank you so much for what you did to save him. how far out was he actually? was he out by the towers? he wasn t that far, but he was about 2 just under 2 1/2 miles. that s amazing. yeah. you really get the perspective out in the boat. it s just incredible, you know, for well, we saw the lights of you guys coming in, and that s all we could see were the little, little lights in the distance. i was like, he can t be out that far. i mean, it was
his rescue is becoming a race against the clock. the odds of william surviving through the night are not good. we really had a very finite amount of time to find him. it was really getting down to the wire at that point. and just as the sun begins to set, william is spotted. another searcher records the action. i was actually pretty astonished that we were able to find him. when we look at the distance off shore, i was even more amazed. by the time officer kelly s boat gets alongside the bewildered william, they are more than 2 1/2 miles from shore. but the horse is reluctant to be rescued. ryan, can i be of any help? i might need you as a counterweight here in a minute. i think we re okay, though. unfortunately, the closer his boat got to ours, that agitated the horse even more. finding william alive is a
you can lead a horse to water, but you can t make him pose. just as william is getting acclimated to the ocean, a wave crashes on the shore. well, of course, he was startled. he s jumping around, pulled me down into the water. and i ended up down in the water with two hands holding my reins. he s jerking me around like a fish on the end of the line. all of a sudden, i can t hold any longer and he breaks away. it s about 4:00 p.m. when a panicked william bolts and runs right into the ocean. he begins swimming along the coastline. another trainer tries to lasso william, but the spooked horse slips away. the rope was on the back of his ears, over his nose, but the way the water was going, when he started to reel it in, it came above his nose and slid over his ears. william turns right and doesn t look back, making a beeline out to sea. his owner, arabian horse breeder mindy peters, is several miles away when she gets a call from a close family friend.