A pair of jet-skiers had a harrowing experience Sunday night caused by quite a series of unfortunate events, but they lived to tell the tale and now are preaching the message of safety.

Brian Sawyer and Joe Johnston gassed up their jet skis and went for a ride Sunday evening to visit the Monitor-Merrimac Memorial Bridge-Tunnel. They left about 6:30 p.m. from Sawyer’s uncle’s house in the 2800 block of North Shore Drive, where the family had been celebrating Father’s Day, Sawyer said.

“I’m pretty familiar with the Nansemond River,” Sawyer said. “It’s the first time I’ve ever ridden by the Monitor-Merrimac.”

Sawyer said the men had all their required equipment, including life jackets. Unfortunately, however, neither of them had a cellphone. Sawyer had just ordered a dry box so he can carry his with him.

A cellphone would have helped, but neither of the men could have predicted the events that would play out over the course of about eight hours Sunday night and early Monday morning.

“I’ve been riding for over 25 years, and I’ve broken down before,” Sawyer said. “I’ve gotten towed in before. But to have the series of events we had yesterday was just crazy.”

The men were in the area of the tunnel when their problems began.

“My ski started running rough, and it cut off like it was out of gas,” Sawyer said. “We hooked up the tow rope I had with me and started towing back towards the bridge.”

However, the rope was not a good quality rope and kept breaking, Sawyer said. The pair finally made it to a rocky beach near the former Tidewater Community College campus. There, they found a better rope, hooked it up and started toward home again.

But then Johnston’s ski ran out of gas, because it was expending so much energy towing Sawyer’s ski. So the men, wearing their life jackets, started towing their skis and swimming for about an hour. Finally, they landed on another beach and attempted to formulate a plan.

They siphoned all the gas from Sawyer’s to Johnston’s machine, but then the second one started having electrical problems. They now had two broken-down jet-skis.

“When one plan failed, we came up with another one,” Sawyer said. “We just kept on moving.”

Now towing both of their skis, Sawyer and Johnston headed for the former site of the Bennett’s Creek Restaurant, where they expected to find a boat ramp. The water was shallow in some places, so they were able to walk instead of swim a fair amount, Sawyer said.

“It was challenging, but between the two of us, neither one of us felt like we were ever in any danger,” Sawyer said. “We just kept working and trying to minimize all the risks.”

When they made it to Bennett’s Creek Restaurant, they found that the boat ramp no longer exists.

“That was another hole in the plan,” Sawyer said. “We were aiming for something that didn’t exist.”

The two men tied up their skis at the site and walked to the Farm Fresh on Bridge Road, where they encountered another man with a cellphone. They used his last 1 percent of battery to call home.

“We never panicked,” Sawyer said. “We’re pretty good trash talkers, so we joked around the whole time. And we knew God was in control.”

Sawyer said they never realized anyone was looking for them, but they were grateful to the U.S. Coast Guard and the Suffolk Department of Fire and Rescue, which launched a combined helicopter and two boats to search for the men.

In addition to God, Sawyer credits a number of factors for his and Johnston’s safe return.

“We had all the required safety equipment. We had tow ropes with us. We stayed together the whole time and were aware of our surroundings,” Sawyer said.

Warm water, clear weather and a nearly full moon also helped, he added.

“It definitely could have been worse,” said Sawyer, whose only scar from the incident is chafed legs from his shorts. “We want to share what went right so that if someone else gets in the same situation, they’ll have a result like we had.”