A man who jumped into an ocean to rescue a man in distress, found out after the rescue that` the the young man was actually his own son whom he had not seen for 13 years.
Phil Baker had not seen his son Benji, for 13 years, as his son lived in the United Kingdom while he lived in Australia.
Benji was born in Australia. Phil and his then partner Jacquie Blake, separated when Benji was 3 years old and Jacquie took the child back to Britain and settled in Haslemere, Surrey.
Phil saw his son a few times over the next five years and kept in touch via email and birthday cards, but eventually lost touch.
Recently, his son Benji, 21, contacted his father, saying that he was planning a trip to Australia and he wanted to meet him.
Eagerly awaiting to meet his son who he had not seen in 13 years, Phil took a walk on the beach with his wife Lyn.
While walking, Phil, 62, saw some kayakers in trouble in the water, and without hesitation, he jumped into the water to help.
While carrying the wounded and semiconscious man to shore he realized that it was his long lost son.
“I looked at his face, and it occurred to me that those brown eyes were very familiar,” Phil said.
Although Phil had seen only a handful of pictures of his son up until the boy was 8 years old, he recognized him immediately.
“In an instant, I knew that the ‘stranger’ was my son,” he added.
When Benji was about 12 years old, he began suffering from seizures. When he was a teen, he was having seizures almost everyday, but within a few years it had subsided.
Benji said that the seizures tend to strike when he feels stressed as it happened on the day when he was preparing to meet his father for the first time in years in Byron Bay, New South Wales.
He decided to go kayaking to calm his nerves, and suffered a seizure in the water. That is when his father came to his rescue.
The father and son are now closer than ever.
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