Three months after nearly drowning, Greg Barnes, a youth pastor on Guam, was finally able to say "thank you" to the Navy search-and-rescue crew who saved his life.

On June 26, he made the trip to Andersen Air Force Base where he met with the Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 25 (HSC-25) chaplain, several members of the squadron, and most importantly, the members of the crew who saved him.

"I want [the crew] to realize quite how special they are," Barnes said. "That's why I wanted to reach out and do this kind of thing. I'd say if you're ever in a situation like this, go out of your way to show how thankful you are."

On a seemingly clear day in March, Barnes nearly drowned during a hiking trip with a group of his students near Pagat Cave. At the beginning of the trip, Barnes directed the group to stay out of the water because the weather seemed worse and the waves higher than usual.

"I said to the boys, 'it's bad water and we're not going to go in there because people die in there all the time, and we don't want that to happen to us," Barnes recalled. "When we got to the water and the overlook area, the way the waves were coming in looked very dangerous."

According to Barnes, he typically checks the weather before going on an outing, but made the mistake not to that day and was unaware of a typhoon moving toward the island.

Despite his initial apprehension about the water, Barnes took the group to what he thought was a fairly safe spot near an overlook to watch the waves break against the rocks and enjoy the sea mist.

After getting the boys seated comfortably and taking a seat alongside the group, the unthinkable happened -- an unusually large wave splashed onto the rocks, pulling Barnes into the sea.

"The first thing that went through my mind was 'I'm gonna die,'" he recalled. "I knew that this was the worst weather that I'd ever seen at that location, and even in a lot better weather than it was that day, people die."

After tumbling around in the water for several seconds, Barnes surfaced and yelled to his students to go for help.

"My first instinct was just to swim as fast as I could directly back, but no matter what [I did, the water] just kept pulling me out," Barnes said. "Despite my best effort, it just kept pulling me back out. Nothing worked to bring me back in, so my instinct when that didn't work began to be to stay afloat as long as possible."

He managed to stay afloat for an hour-and-a-half until a crew from HSC-25 pulled him from the water, exhausted and naked from trying to use his bright orange swim trunks to signal a rescue crew. He was transported to a hospital and survived the ordeal.

Barnes said it was important to him to meet the crew because he is unsure of how many people take the time to come and let them know what a huge impact rescuers have had on survivors.

"I'm so thankful for all of them, and what [the crew] did was just incredible," he said. "They save people like me who try to be safe, but sometimes you just don't realize how dangerous it is."

Rescues are a collaborative effort of Search-and-Rescue Guam, which consists of the Guam Fire Department, Guam Police Department, U.S. Coast Guard and HSC-25.

HSC-25 is the only squadron in the Navy that maintains a 24-hour search-and-rescue and medical alert posture, directly supporting the U.S. Coast Guard and Joint Region Marianas.

For more news from Naval Forces Marianas, visit www.navy.mil/ .