HOUSTON -- One used his Coast Guard training. The other kept thinking of his family.

The result was the same—and miraculous—for Mike Anderson and Mark Davidson, who lived to tell of a 14-mile ride on Hurricane Ike’s surge after crashing waves and 110-mph winds destroyed their homes on Bolivar Peninsula.

Houston Chronicle

Mike Anderson, 49, said thoughts of his family kept him alive.

As Ike crushed the Texas coast a little more than two weeks ago, Anderson and Davidson were swept across East Bay and washed up into Chambers County. Both were rescued among tons of debris, from refrigerators to furniture, compressed like a trash compactor along the county’s miles of mostly uninhabited salt marsh.

Anderson, 49, said thoughts of his family kept him alive. His feet are still scabbed and swollen from a flesh-eating bacteria, but other cuts and ant bites are mostly healed.

Houston Chronicle

Mark Davidson, 48, spent 14 hours in the water and one night in the hospital, but he said even 23 years in the Coast Guard were not enough to temper his terror during his long night in the dark.

Anderson, who spent 36 hours in the water clad only in shorts, was discharged Friday after 11 days in the hospital. His wife, Dawn, and their two children, ages 6 and 4 months, had evacuated their home in Crystal Beach as Ike approached, but Anderson remained.

“Sometimes I wanted to give up, but I held on. Thinking of my family kept me alive,” he said in a story in Sunday’s Houston Chronicle.

The day before Ike’s landfall, water already had begun to submerge Texas 87, the only exit road for those living on Bolivar.  After telephone pleas from his family, Anderson tried to escape in his van with his two miniature Doberman pinschers and his son’s guinea pig. He barely made it across Rollover Pass when water started splashing over his hood and gushing in the windows.

He eventually swam to a rental house a few hundred yards away, transporting his pets in two trips. By midnight, waves broke the windows and knocked the door off its hinges. Anderson dove into the water and clung to the roof until the house began to sink.

Dog paddling through ocean swells that often took him under, he said, “I bargained with God that I would try to be a better man if he would give me something to float on.”

He found some plywood and a rafter that helped keep him afloat as the current carried him across submerged Bolivar and East Bay.  He came to a halt about six miles inside Chambers County atop a bed of floating wreckage. He found a pear, a can of Sprite, and some Tupperware to catch rainwater.

He rested, trying to avoid alligators and water moccasins. The next day, helicopters circled overhead, plucking four others from the water, but rescuers didn’t see him. He eventually swam to a nearby oil well and caught the attention of some passers-by by yelling for help.

Davidson, 48, spent 14 hours in the water and one night in the hospital, but he said even 23 years in the Coast Guard were not enough to temper his terror during his long night in the dark.

His wife, Denise, and yellow lab, Daisy, had both heeded the evacuation order. But like Anderson, Davidson never believed he was putting himself in danger by staying.

He realized he’d made a terrible mistake when the waters began lapping the floor under his stilt house. He went to his dresser and put on his dog tags in case he was found dead.

Waves began crashing through the boarded windows and wind rocked his house off its pilings, setting it adrift with him inside.  Eventually, he swam to open water, away from flying debris. A small tabletop floated up. He used it like a boogie board.

His salvage skills netted him a bottle of Gatorade, a child’s life jacket and a kayak, which he was in when a National Guard helicopter spotted him.