Imagine this: You’re raging your face off on a Club Med yacht in the middle of the Caribbean Sea, having the time of your goddamn life, when suddenly you lose your balance, topple overboard, and plunge into the ocean. No one sees you fall; no one can hear your drunken cries for help. Sheer terror grips you as the yacht keeps on plowing ahead, leaving you stranded in its wake. You try not to panic; you start treading water, convinced that pretty soon, your friends are going to realize you’re missing, turn around, and come rescue you. Thirty minutes go by. Then an hour. Then two. There’s still no sign of the boat. Now you panic. Your legs are aching, and you don’t know how much longer you can keep this up.
Eleven hours after you first dropped into the sea, the sun is going down, and you’re barely keeping your head above water. The muscles in your legs are burning, and your arms feel like Jell-O. This is it, you think to yourself. This is how it ends. Just when you’re about to give up hope, you make out a large, looming shape on the horizon, headed straight for you. It gets closer, and closer, and closer, until finally it’s there: your salvation. You look up to try to spot the benevolent saint that came to your rescue, narrow your eyes, and see that it’s… No, you think to yourself. That can’t be right. But it is: Towering above you, sent from the heavens to whisk you away to safety, is Leonardo motherfucking DiCaprio.
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This is not the plot of some new Scorcese movie, or a description of a bizarre dream I had once— this actually happened, somehow. In late December, according to People, DiCaprio was putzing around in a yacht off the coast of St. Barts with his 22-year-old girlfriend and a bunch of his buddies when the captain heard some drunk guy had fallen off a ship nearby. They decided to try to help rescue him, and—out of all the ships scouring the waters for this man—theirs was the only one that found him.
“Their efforts resulted in helping save a man’s life,” a source told People. “The boat crew were happy to try and assist—even more so that they were able to help get the man to safety.”
DiCaprio (or, probably more accurately, a bunch of people onboard who weren’t DiCaprio) rescued the guy about an hour before the sun went down and a brutal rainstorm started. According to the Sun, he was minutes away from drowning when he was saved. He’s apparently totally fine.
This catapults DiCaprio high into the rankings of celebrities who have batshit stories about saving someone’s life—somewhere ahead of Clint Eastwood, who once gave some dude choking on a piece of cheese the Heimlich, and behind Harrison Ford, who piloted a helicopter into a forest, dropped out of the sky, and rescued a stranded hiker back in 2000. Sitting comfortably at number one is John Oates, who once beat the shit out of an armed robber in a ski mask and tossed him through a plate glass window. Not sure how anyone’s going to top that.
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