A pin in a haystack - searched and found!

 Dieter Steffens, captain of a sea rescue cruiser, was in the German North Sea in 1990:
" Then I suddenly heard something rushing, I looked, it was at night, it was about 11.30 p.m., and then I heard something and looked, I looked and looked up and said to my colleagues: "Hang on tight, there's something coming in huge! There we had got, as they say nowadays, such a Kaventsmann, such a huge wave. It was about, I don't know, 10 meters high, our boat is 10.50 meters high, you had to definitely look six, seven meters high, was the wave that arrived there. We got it crosswise, so we hit it crosswise, 110 degrees, we're not quite familiar with it. And there I got out of the boat (washed overboard).
    First to realize that you were in the water at all, what had happened until you regained consciousness to some extent, there was in the wave height - that could not be grasped at all.

Where I was in the water, I thought: What happened? Now you're drifting here ... I knew from experience that in bad weather I could find anyone at all, it's like a needle in a haystack.  Then I first prayed, I said kann´s calmly, I am not necessarily a believing person, but I really prayed to God that he should help me!
   One says , life passes you by. But it is really like that. You think of the children, at that time we still had two children, they were small, you think of the children, you don't see them growing up anymore. How does that continue with the family?  That also gave them strength."

Around 0.40 o'clock he was sighted and pulled out by a helicopter. A few minutes longer, he would not have held out with the cold water of the North Sea any longer.

"The helicopter always went with his light cone two, three, four hundred meters at me long, which has only a certain cone with which he can search. You get crazy in your head.  The luck was then the Otto Schülke, who was also sent there (...) and then they got me into the spotlight and also, because I screamed like that, they found me.
    But they couldn't take me on board because the wave height was too high. (...) Then they ordered the helicopter there and it got me out of there; but how this all happened, I can't say, I don't know that until today. All I know is that I somehow got into that noose; then I woke up in the hospital again.
 I thanked God where I was in the hospital, yes. I said, so that it went so clearly. That he helped me after all."

( It is taken from here: Seenot )