On Saturday July 14 at 6 p.m., Paul Brown was walking around his living room and thought he heard someone yelling his name. Suddenly his cell phone rang and at the same time he looked out his window towards the lake to see his neighbor’s sailboat tipped over on its side. He answered the phone to hear the man’s wife screaming ‘Help! He’s in the water.?
Brown quickly ‘bolted? out the door, down the hill and met the woman at his boat, anxiously trying to get the cover off of it.
‘I cleared maybe a foot of the cover, whipped over the top and hopped in and fired up and starting heading towards it (the sailboat),? said Brown. ‘She was on the phone with 911 because we couldn’t see him.?
According to Brown, when they got within about a 100 yards of the man’s boat they spotted his head above water. He was holding onto the front of the boat. The man’s wife had been worried because there was already another pontoon boat there circling around and she thought they might be looking for her husband and couldn’t see him.
‘She was really panicked,? said Brown.
The problem was that the older lady driving the other pontoon boat had no life preservers or rope on board and she couldn’t get close enough to the man without fear of running him over, Brown said.
‘She was just circling, didn’t know what to do,? he said.
Brown saw two life jackets floating away in the water, apparently the man had neglected to wear one.
Brown had arrived at the scene at about the same time as Chuck Halpin.
When Brown got close enough the man said he was cold, needed help getting out of the water, and had been in there too long. He also did not want to get tangled up on the sail.
Brown was close enough where he could get into the water, hold on to the side of his boat pull the man in by the hand and bring him around to the ladder as the man held onto Brown’s shoulders.
‘The other two boats that were there didn’t have ladders that he could get to so that he could get out of the water,? said Brown. ‘Had they, maybe he would have made a try to get over to them.
Brown was able to get the mast of the boat onto his boat, flip the boat over and tow it in.
Brown said a the man had tried to ‘right the boat,? but because he didn’t have a life jacket on, he got too tired to help himself.
‘Was he drowning? No. Could he get out of the water? No, he was sort of stuck there waiting for someone to get him out,? said Brown. ‘I would say it was a close call, if no one would have been around I think he could have been in trouble in a little bit of time.?
The man had probably been in the water for about 8-10 minutes before Brown got out there.
‘That guy (Brown) is a hero in my book,? said Halpin.
According to Brown, his neighbor was 60 years old and had prior heart problems that were affected by the cold water.
‘When you’re out by yourself you got to have life jackets on because you don’t know what’s going to happen out there,? said Brown. ‘You may be a strong swimmer, but if someone runs you over or you hit your head (you could be in trouble).?
Brown recalled an incident he heard the other day on the radio, about a man in St. Claire who got hit unconscious by the boom of his sailboat and drowned because he was not wearing a life jacket. Even though people pulled him out of the water pretty quickly, it was too late.
‘People need to think about what they have in their boat to help someone that one chance that it comes up and make sure they are ready to do something,? said Brown.
He recommended having extra life jackets, rope and a boat hook on board.