Rescue At Sea

Yesterday afternoon, after we'd finished all the racers, we hauled anchor and began skimming across the waves in our little motorboat, heading from Jericho Bay back to the Eggemoggin Reach. [One pleasure of the weekend, by the way, was that I was devouring issues of the New Yorker, and the most recent had a reminiscence by Roger Angell of a summertime spent there on the Eggemoggin Reach. I drove past his mailbox a couple of times while going to the town dock in Sedgwick.] We were making the usual jokes about the kayakers ("how many points if I can take them both out in one swipe?") when one waved us down. We throttled back and approached, and one of the kayakers had a teenage boy clinging to her boat. He'd capsized, apparently, and lost his boat. He'd been in the water for at least 20 minutes, he estimated, before the pair of kayakers had come by and he'd been able to crawl up and cling onto the present kayak. We hauled him onto our motor boat. I pulled off my fleece jacket and got him out of his lifejacket and wet t-shirt and into it. I dug in my bag for some fleece socks and put them on his feet. His legs, he said, he couldn't feel his legs. He was very scared. I reassured him that although he probably had hypothermia it wasn't like frostbite; his legs would be okay as he warmed back up. We covered him up with fleece pants and brought him to a dock next door to his family's summer house. I told him to run a lukewarm bath and to get into it, and drink some tea, but to make sure to warm himself up slowly. We dropped him off and he proceeded the short distance home alone, taking my jacket and socks with him. Sigh. I probably should have given him my address so he could mail them back. Oh well. I should have told him to expect a strong and surprising fatigue. Hypothermia will knock you out as though you've run a marathon or something.