IT EMERGED yesterday just how lucky ‘miracle diver’ Matthew Harvey was not to have died. Harbour master Captain Peter Gill said that he had never heard of anyone pulled from the sea alive after 58 hours.

‘It’s extraordinary to see someone survive like that, given the sort of sea temperatures we are dealing with,’ he said.

‘He is an extremely lucky chap. Things such as the strong wind, the wind-chill factor and the rough sea all conspire against you, both in finding someone and the ability of the individual to survive’.

One of two men involved in the dramatic rescue of Mr Harvey spoke yesterday about how they discovered him being pulled from the sea by the crew of a yacht.

They noted that Mr Harvey, 35, who went diving on Saturday morning and was rescued on Monday evening, was unconscious at the time and thought it was his body being recovered.

It came as a welcome surprise that he was alive.

‘The guy is extremely lucky to be alive and it just can’t have been his time to go,’ said one of the men, who asked not to be named. ‘It’s a miracle, and a lovely one at that.’

Ambulance and Rescue chief officer Neil Tucker said it was always difficult to calculate how long someone could last when lost at sea.

‘Survival times in the sea are subject to so many variables that they are impossible to predict with any degree of certainty,’ he said.

‘There are always individual cases which seem to confound normal expectations.’

Mr Harvey was discharged from hospital yesterday afternoon.

Father, Dan, said his son was exhausted after his ordeal.

‘He’s totally lucid but we’re not asking him any questions as he’s been through such a lot,’ he said.

‘He just feels like he’s been pulled through a mangle.’

Steve and Anne-Marie Westwood were aboard their yacht watching a pod of dolphins off Fermain shortly before 7pm when they noticed something floating in the water which turned out to be Mr Harvey, who was motionless in the water.

‘He was in his wetsuit, which had a tear across the hood.

‘He hadn’t got his tank or regs ‘oxygen regulators’ and no weight belt, so clearly he’d managed to dump them and he was just floating on his back,’ said Mr Westwood.

Mrs Westwood urged other boaters to take a look if they saw something suspicious in the water.

‘We were racing for the ‘St Peter Port marina’ cill at the time to try and get in and we thought that something wasn’t right,’ she said.

‘It could so easily have been that we just carried on.’