(NEWS WEEK) Brendan Cole, November 5, 2018 — A fisherman has been hailed a hero after he plucked to safety an 18-month-old baby he had spotted bobbing in the ocean. Gus Hutt was on holiday near Whakatane, in New Zealand’s North Island, when he spotted a small figure floating in the water he initially believed was a doll.

“His face looked just like porcelain with his short hair wetted down, but then he let out a little squeak and I thought ‘oh God this is a baby and it’s alive.’ He was floating at a steady pace…if I had been just a minute later I wouldn’t have seen him,” he told the New Zealand Herald.

Usually Hutt would head out from Murphy’s Holiday Camp on Matata Beach to fish from the beach, but at around 7.30 a.m. on October 26, he took a slight detour. “He was bloody lucky, but he just wasn’t meant to go, it wasn’t his time,” Hutt said

via Fisherman Discovers 18-month-old Baby Floating in Ocean in ‘Freakish Miracle’.