A fishing crew off Port Lincoln in South Australia pulled off one of the year’s most unlikely rescues on 21 October 2026 — saving a kangaroo found swimming about three kilometres out to sea.
Diver Jake Murray and his crew-mates, working for local diving company Van Dorn, had left the marina at about 7 a.m. to inspect kingfish farms in Boston Bay when skipper Ryan Smith spotted something odd in the calm water. “We doubled back to check it out and yeah, it was a bloody roo in the water!” Murray told ABC News Australia.
A knackered roo
The male red kangaroo was clearly exhausted. Murray opened the boat’s sea door, which drops to water level, lifted the animal aboard, and held it close, keeping its powerful hind legs under control while the boat carried it back to shore. “He’s obviously been swimming around for a while … it was pretty knackered, pretty waterlogged,” Murray said.
The crew released the kangaroo onto a beach, where it rested briefly before hopping away under its own strength. The rescue matters even more because Boston Bay and the waters around Port Lincoln are known for great white shark sightings, and an exhausted animal in open water would have been easy prey.
How did it get there?
Exactly how the kangaroo ended up several kilometres from land remains a mystery. Murray suggested that the unusually calm conditions might have played a role, with the animal potentially becoming caught in the tide while swimming. The national park lies close to town, and kangaroos are occasionally seen in shallow coastal waters — but finding one so far offshore was completely unexpected.
Red kangaroos are the largest living marsupials and the largest terrestrial mammals native to Australia. They are strong swimmers when they need to be, but three kilometres of open sea is a very long way for an animal built for hopping, not paddling. This one, thanks to a crew that happened to be in the right place at the right time, lived to hop another day.
Sources: ABC News Australia (ABC Eyre Peninsula), 21 Oct 2026; DiverNet, 29 Oct 2026; The Cooldown, 28 Oct 2026.
