Williams, who spent a week in the East Arm of Great Slave Lake battling three-metre swells, was found in relatively good shape by a search team Tuesday night. He walked off the rescue helicopter into Stanton Regional Hospital at about 10 p.m.

"I'm still trying to put it together," said a still disorientated Williams that night.

Williams, who now lives in Calgary, left Yellowknife the evening of Tuesday, July 8, to meet friends at Quiet Bay, located in the Hearne Channel in Great Slave Lake's East Arm.

He missed the entrance to Hearne Channel and continued on about 80 kilometres south to the Hornby Channel, where he entered the Simpson Island chain and lost his bearings.

He said that he entered a cove, and that when he looked back toward where he came in, all he could see was land, because islands in the mouth of the cove gave the illusion of a continuous piece of land.

"My big motor crapped out," he said, so he decided to camp on land that first night.

All Williams had then was his trolling motor, and he spent the next two days visiting the four corners of the 90-kilometre-long cove, which took a day just to cross.

After three days, with only a quarter of a tank of gas left, he decided to concentrate on making himself visible to search party.

Travelling in the direction in which he entered the cove, he made one final push, hoping that he could find open water.

He made it to the mouth of the Hornby Channel, and tied his boat to the channel marker, where he thought he would be visible.

"And then the storm came up," he said.

It was there that he spent three days battling the three-metre waves, and the vicious wind that produced them.

"I tried to eat a piece of bread a day," he said, "But I wasn't hungry."

The line that Williams used to tie up his boat was always in danger of breaking, because every time he would be at the other end of the three-metre waves from the buoy, the line snap tight. He had another line ready to tie, just in case the first one broke.

Williams said that he hardly slept because he didn't want the line to break while he wasn't awake. He was also trying to keep the boat head-on into the waves.

If a bad wave had have hit him sideways, "I was over bow," he said.

He saw one Twin Otter airplane, he said, but it didn't see him. Finally, late Tuesday afternoon, he and a coast guard helicopter made contact with each other.

The pilot radioed the RCMP Hay River boat, the Guardian, which was setting up camp on Simpson Island, near the fish plant there.

Jack Kruger and Bill Messner of the coast guard auxiliary then hopped in the boat and motored over to the buoy that William's boat was attached to and pulled him into the Guardian.

He was brought him back to the fish plant's helicopter pad, where the Great Slave Helicopter rescue helicopter picked him up and took him to Stanton Hospital in Yellowknife.

"He's quite lucky ... I was starting to get a little skeptical," said Kruger of Williams' chances.

Williams even wrote his will and sealed it in a plastic bag, along with his remaining matches.

Both rescuers were relieved to have found Williams because of the nature of the storm.

"It's the worst I've ever seen it," said Kruger, a veteran of many years of plying Great Slave Lake waters.

"Things went really well, everything was clicking," said Messner, who helped pull Williams aboard the rescue boat.

Williams was in good enough shape that he headed back to Calgary on Wednesday. But before he left, he took the addresses of Kruger and Messner, and said "I'm sending them Christmas gifts!"