Michael Trapp Crashes Small Plane Into Lake Huron, Treads Water for 18 Hours to Survive (VIDEO)

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A New York man was forced to tread water for a whopping 18 hours in Lake Huron after his 2-seat Cessna plane crashed into the lake.

42-year-old Michael Trapp swam in Lake Huron without a life jacket for nearly a day as he "wasn't ready to die yet," the Associated Press reports.

The auto mechanic from Gouverneur, New York, left home on Tuesday to attend a family reunion in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. He decided to fly his own plane because a round-trip ticket cost $922. "I said: I can fly there and back for 400 bucks and I wanted to do it," Trapp told reporters while recovering at a Saginaw hospital.

All was fine with the flight as he crossed over Canada, but the plane's engine started to sputter over Michigan. He contacted flight officials in Lansing to tell them he was going down while the plane was at 3,000 feet, Trapp told local Fox affiliate WWNY. He crashed near Harbor Beach, 105 miles north of Detroit.

"I just kept struggling and struggling," he said. He told reporters that he tried to use a credit card to reflect the sun to get the attention of nearby boats.

"It's amazing what goes on in your mind when you're laying in water and you look up at the skies and watch the shooting stars and watch meteorites go round. Gives you time to realize what's important in life at that point," Trapp told local New York station WWNY-TV while recovering.

Finally, at around 10:20am on Wednesday, Dean and Diane Petitpren, a couple from Grosse Pointe Farms near Detroit, saw him waving his sock in the water and took him aboard their yacht.

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