A pianist treaded water for nine hours off Newport Beach

At about 2:30 in the morning on Friday, Nov. 6, a man went over the side of Royal Caribbean's Ovation of the Seas, somewhere off Southern California. Nobody has said how; the Coast Guard is investigating. The ship docked in Los Angeles that morning with a crew member missing, while he was still out in the Pacific with no life jacket, treading water. At noon, about nine hours later, he was still at it. He was 15 to 20 miles offshore, "pretty much in the middle of the ocean," said Adam Yacenda, a Newport Beach lifeguard battalion chief.

Sean Norton and Grant Garrett were heading home from marlin fishing near Catalina Island when their captain spotted him. "Yeah, it's a human being," Garrett told CBS Los Angeles. "Stop the boat; let's get all of our lines in." The two men each took an arm and lifted him aboard. He was in total shock, Norton said. "The only thing he said to me was, 'Thank you. I thought I was gonna die.'" He turned out to be one of the ship's pianists, and he's expected to survive.

The Coast Guard's statement says, in its plain official way, that the call came from "a Good Samaritan." Norton credits the water. This year's El Niño is the strongest on record, and the sea was 76 degrees. "A different year, no way he makes it," Norton told CBS Los Angeles. That warmth was no gift wrapped for one man, though; Nature reported on Nov. 9 that the same El Niño is expected to bring food shortages and disease elsewhere.

The psalm on today's card was written by a man testing, on paper, whether he could get away from God. He tries the sky and he tries the grave. Then he reaches for the farthest place he can picture, the far side of the sea, about as far as anyone in his world could end up. Even there, he says, the hand is holding him.

The psalm doesn't promise a boat.

Not everyone who goes over the side is found, and the poem has nothing glib to say to their families. For nine hours on Nov. 6, a pianist was about as far out as a person gets, until two men reeled in their lines and lifted him out. The psalm's claim is wider than that one boat: no water is dark or far enough to carry a person past God's hold.