Vomiting over the side of a ferry would have made for a bad enough night for Bob Lord.

But his night got worse, when he fell off that ferry and landed in the Pacific Ocean on the evening of July 25, 1993.

The water is where he would stay for the next eight hours, drifting through the ocean in the dark and treading water the whole time.

The graphic said it all

CBC's Prime Time News used this graphic to help illustrate just how far Bob Lord drifted after falling off a ferry in July 1993. (Prime Time News/CBC Archives)

The ferry had been making its way from Swartz Bay on Vancouver Island to Tsawwassen on the B.C. mainland, and Lord fell off about halfway through that journey. Worse, no one noticed that he had gone over the side.

Lord didn't have a life jacket when he hit the water. He was fully dressed in the clothes he had worn to a family picnic that day, which meant he had to tread all that time while wearing jeans, a shirt and a windbreaker.

He ended up drifting toward Washington's Orcas Island, where an off-duty American police officer spotted him and saved him.

Throughout his ordeal, he was determined to survive — though he faced some scary moments.

'I realized how cold it was'

Bob Lord looked at his watch to double-check how long he'd been back out of the water -- 36 hours, at the time he talked to reporters about his ordeal at sea. (Prime Time News/CBC Archives)

"When the sun was coming up, when I had been in the cold water, I realized how cold it was," Lord told reporters, noting that his hands, legs and feet eventually felt numb.

Yet barely a day after his tumble into the sea, Lord had already recovered from the effects of hypothermia.

"I feel great," a surprisingly calm Lord told reporters.

"It's so hard to believe that 36 hours ago I was in the ocean floating around," he added.

'He fell off the ferry!'

In 1994, the Front Page Challenge panel tries to guess the identity of Bob Lord. 1:24

His amazing tale of survival led to Lord appearing on TV again in future — including on CBC's Midday and Front Page Challenge.

His story was one the Front Page Challenge panellists remembered well, as seen in the clip immediately above, months after Lord went overboard.

Jack Webster and Betty Kennedy began the process of trying to figure out who Lord was, but it was Pierre Berton who got zeroed in on the story.

"He fell off the ferry!" Berton said.