This is from another boating forum I am on. Pretty interesting read.
At a moments notice shit can take a turn and get serious real fast.
I took the Cougar up river this morning solo from Windsor, usually when I do this I just zip up to the no-wake line at the gorge and come back. Today for some reason I thought I'd go further up and get lunch at Pirates. After lunch I did another odd thing I never do and went up river, no flat water to have fun with a bunch of people pulling kids and stuff, quite a few people on the water for a Tuesday. After a few miles I was just getting ready to turn back when I saw a lady clinging to the reeds on the AZ side waving me down frantically, I shut down and turned toward her. She was clinging to a large dog, the dog was paddling frantically to keep them both afloat. As I get closer she yells that her husband is drowning and point down river to help him. He is about 50 yards down floating fast in the river, he looks like he is really struggling to stay above water. I keep going toward him, he is non verbal at this point, I throw him a vest and he grabs it. I look back toward her and her dog is done, she lets go and starts to go down. I go back to her and I can't find another vest within reach or my throwable, but she is close enough to grab my swim platform. Her dog Is now floating down river about even with me in the boat, so I jump in (no vest on) to get the dog, I pull the dog up and try to swim back to the boat with him but he is killing me, I had to let him go and get back to the boat, kind of half swimming and pushing him every other stroke.
The dog and I get back to the boat swim step and hang on. The lady, hanging on to the swim step is too tired and gassed out to get in the boat, we both just hang on trying to catch our breaths for a few minutes. The 75lb dog is kinda clinging to me and the swim step. She finally gets in and helps me get the dog on the transom. We go back and help him back in but he is too gassed out to help himself onto the swim step but we eventually pull him in. I'm bleeding pretty good on my forearm, the dogs claws cut me up a bit, otherwise everyone is ok.
As we are heading back up river to their day camp, she tells me they had been in the water for an hour and nobody would stop. Given the distance and speed of the current I think it was more like 5-10 minutes they were in the water but it is amazing with all the other boaters that nobody else stopped to help. Apparently they were all in an inflatable floaty thing and fell out then the current took them all down river.
This was a big wake up call for me, I learned some lessons today:
1. Be better prepared, should have had better access to more life vests and throwable.
2. Have a better plan in case this happens again. Generally we have it covered for the people in our boat, but never expected to come across people in the river while boating alone.
3. I should have put a vest on for myself before jumping in the water. The current there is killer.
Have a great 4th of July weekend everyone, I hope these lessons are something that makes us think about water safety more.
