A recent story out of Maine proves a gun can save your life in more ways than one.

On Sunday, Phillip Langevin and his three friends set out to go fishing in the Gulf of Maine. About 10 miles offshore, the group decided to cast their lines as they floated with current.

However, according to Langevin, the Gulf was choppy and their boat quickly started taking on water. As the water pooled in the back of the boat, the group moved to the front to balance things out. But it was pointless; a 3-foot waved barreled into them, capsizing the boat.

“[The water] hit us in the back of the legs,” Langevin tells the Bangor Daily News. “And next thing the boat just flipped.”

“Those guys [referring to the other three boaters] went in one direction. I went in another,” he recounts.

While there were lifejackets on the boat, neither Langevin or his three friends were wearing them when they were thrown overboard.

“They were all ready to grab if we had the time,” Langevin says. “But we didn’t have the time.”

“[I] had a life jacket in my hand and it got caught in the boat and I couldn’t get it,” he adds.

Thankfully, he and the two other men quickly resurfaced after going under and were able to grab onto the capsized boat, but the woman they were with was no where to be found.

“Her boyfriend said he had ahold of her. And the force pulled her out from his arms,” Langevin says. “The last thing any of us heard her say is ‘I can’t swim.’ And we didn’t know if she had sunk or got washed off.”

According to Langevin, the only reason the rest of them weren’t lost to the sea was because he remembered his friend had a gun.

“Flare guns and everything else was under the boat,” Langevin relates. “And I told Jim, I said, ‘Fire your gun.’”

Another boater about a half-mile away heard the gunshot and rescued the three men.

I guess this gives us just one more reason to carry our firearms wherever possible – you never know when it could save your life.