The Rescuers: Answering the Call When There’s Trouble on the Water

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It was just after 5 p.m., and John Patmore, chief ranger at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore near Munising, Michigan, and Ranger Bill Smith were driving home at the end of their shift in September last year when a man, drenched and in kayak gear, came running toward their vehicles.

He collapsed in front of the first car.

“We had just left the office and were driving down the road when he ran out of the woods and collapsed on the road right in front of Bill’s vehicle,” says John, who is the park’s chief ranger.

“Picture a deer running out of the woods in front of your car and just collapsing on the pavement; that’s kind of what it was like.”

John and Bill rushed to his aid. The exhausted man, Sean Royston of Cottage Grove, Wisconsin, explained that he’d been swimming four hours in turbulent Lake Superior after his kayak had capsized. He had just reached land. Sean told the rangers his two paddling buddies also had been tumbled by large waves. He believed one made the cliffside.

John called Alger County Sheriff’s dispatch and asked them to notify the U.S. Coast Guard in Sault Ste. Marie – the station in charge of all Coast Guard rescue response on Lake Superior.

Within minutes, the rescue effort was set into motion with coordinated rescuers – local, state, provincial and national – standing ready or already on their way.

Respect the Lake

Each year, thousands of paddlers, swimmers, sailors and powerboaters enjoy Big Lake adventures without any incident, big or small.

But this Lake is not domesticated, and some areas and many conditions are not for amateurs. Occasionally even the well-seasoned get caught by weather and water that can quickly turn an adventure into a matter of survival.

That’s when it’s good to know that so many professionals respond to a call for help, from local police to county sheriffs to U.S. and Canadian Coast Guard teams. The national parks also have rescue capabilities.

Last year proved particularly busy for rescuers on Lake Superior and on three occasions ended in tragedy: A boy, caught in a current, drowned off Stockton Island, Wisconsin; one man drowned and another made it to shore when their small boat capsized near Havilland Bay, Ontario; and two men and a boy drowned when their 16-foot boat capsized while they were trout fishing near Chassell, Michigan.

At Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, an influx of inexperienced kayaking enthusiasts has been challenging for the park safety team.

All it takes is an unexpected change in conditions, as Sean and his friends found out at Pictured Rocks. When they started out, the marine forecast predicted 1- to 3-foot waves that day, but conditions changed to 4- to 6-foot waves in high winds.

“The waves continued to get higher and crash and we ended up going against the rocks,” Sean told a TV news station afterwards.

On the Pictured Rocks road, Bill stayed with the exhausted Sean while John connected with two more rangers who headed out into Lake Superior on the 36-foot National Park Service rescue boat.

Within 10 minutes, they found another kayaker, James Farrington, seated precariously on a cliff.

The rangers were able to communicate with him by loudspeaker, and James used hand signals to direct them toward where he had last seen the third kayaker.

By this time, a Coast Guard helicopter team from Traverse City, Michigan, had arrived and came to James’ aid.

“They picked him off the cliff,” John says. “They have done it before, but not all that often. It was exciting to watch.”

The helicopter transported James to the Munising Memorial Hospital/Baycare Medical Center and then returned to join the search for Tolan Annis.

It turned out Tolan floated for seven hours before he reached the shore. He dialed 911 on his cell phone, and though his reception was poor and he wasn’t familiar enough with the area to describe his location, the sheriff's dispatcher pinged his location from the cell signal and guided the helicopter there.

The helicopter located Tolan and hovered until a land rescue crew could locate him.

“The rescue worked well,” John says. “Communication among agencies is often listed as one of the barriers to success. In this case, it’s what led to our success.”

The Right Stuff, the Wrong Time

The three kayakers did almost everything right. They were wearing life jackets, had proper gear and clothing and had checked the weather. But a capricious Lake Superior still calls the shots.

Tolan and Sean survived in the water for so long because they were wearing dry suits, which keep out water. The water temperature that day was 65 degrees – warm for Lake Superior, but still cold enough to cause hypothermia quickly.

The NPS and Coast Guard teach what is called the 1-10-1 rule for cold-water survival without a dry suit.

“Meaning once you fall in cold water, defined as below 70° F, you have one minute to control your breathing against the gasping reflex, catch your breath and calm yourself down,” John says. “You then have 10 minutes before you lose feeling and coordination in your limbs; then you have about one hour before losing consciousness.”

One thing the kayakers could have done better was to carry a handheld marine radio, John says. Marine radios allow rescuers and victims to communicate directly, which can speed the rescue, potentially a life-saving difference.

The marine emergency channel is monitored by the Coast Guard and other rescue agencies and also by recreational boaters, commercial vessels and others.

“In busier boating areas like Pictured Rocks or the Apostle Islands, a nearby boater will sometimes hear a distress call and can quickly be on scene to help,” John says. “In the case of these kayakers at Pictured Rocks, there weren’t any other boats in the area, but if they had had one and had been able to immediately call for help, nobody would have had to be in the water or stuck on a cliff for hours.”

On the afternoon of July 13 at Pictured Rocks, rescue for 30 kayakers in danger of capsizing came in the form of a Pictured Rocks Cruises boat.

The wind had shifted with 20 to 30 mph gusts, and the kayakers were unable to make headway against the strong winds and waves. Some tipped and were in danger of swamping. The cruise boat, out for an afternoon tour, plucked 28 of them from the water. The National Park Service rescued two others.

Knowledge for Newcomers

In general, Lake Superior is experiencing a surge in outdoor visitors, which has led to an increase in emergencies, rescues and near-misses.

“Ever since the ice caves went viral four years ago, traffic in the (Apostle Islands) park has bumped up. There’s more people with less knowledge and experience with Lake Superior,” says Gail Green, who owns Living Adventure in Bayfield and has 30 years experience in sea kayaking and guiding.

Pictured Rocks, meanwhile, has shattered visitation records in recent years.

The National Park Service has made it a priority to get the message out about safety, targeting visitors at three points in their trip: during planning, at arrival and at launch.

Gail alerts people at the planning stage that Lake Superior is not just another inland lake and is not to be trifled with. She does not allow kayak rental reservations online; she wants to communicate directly with paddlers new to the Lake. Living Adventure also requires a three-hour safety course on technical skills and on the essentials of wind, water and waves.

“We want people to experience the awe and wonder and bigness of Lake Superior,” she says. “But the flip side is the respect and knowledge required to be safe.”

The main factors leading to the need for water rescues, say experts, are a lack of knowledge and preparation, including inadequate gear and clothing, insufficient information or errors in judgment, and shifting weather and wind.

Of the 536 drowning deaths on the Great Lakes since 2010 (37 in Lake Superior), only four victims were wearing life jackets, says Jamie Racklyeft, who founded the Great Lakes Water Safety Consortium with the mission of ending drowning on the Great Lakes.

“It all happens so fast. Most people do not intend to get in the water, but then they dive in for their cellphone or to help someone else out and they end up in trouble,” he says.

Jamie himself nearly died in a rip current, enjoying play in the water just a few feet from shore in Lake Michigan.

Experts recommend that should you find yourself in a rip current – a powerful, temporary channel moving quickly away from shore – that you do not fight the current, but instead try to swim perpendicular to the flow (often swimming parallel to shore).

Even knowing the recommendations, he still found himself in trouble. “The current took me and pounded me to the bottom. I was done.”

Jamie woke up on shore; a kayaker had seen him go under and rescued him. A swimmer did die there on that same day. Jamie appreciates how close he came to being a statistic himself. “I was the lucky one.”

Working Together

The National Park Service trains, coordinates and works with multiple agencies to prepare for rescues.

“We work closely together with the Coast Guard and the sheriff’s department,” Pictured Rocks Chief Ranger John Patmore says. “We train, we have good equipment – and if it’s not safe, we will turn around.”

In July, when 11 kayakers found themselves in trouble near Sand Island in the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, the park and U.S. Coast Guard in Bayfield got a call at 7:30 p.m.

A severe thunderstorm rolled into the region that night, causing massive flash flooding, washing out roads and killing two people on the mainland.

Three NPS vessels with a crew of seven and a Coast Guard vessel with four onboard headed into the storm amid 4-foot waves. They found the kayakers, cold and wet, on the island. They brought them to the mainland visitor center for the night, returning for their gear the next day.

A tragic event later in the summer in Wisconsin brought together six agencies – the National Park Service, Red Cliff and Bad River Bands of Lake Superior Ojibwe, Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, Coast Guard personnel from Bayfield and a Coast Guard helicopter team from Traverse City – to search for a local teenage boy dragged out by a rip current off Stockton Island into 8-foot waves.

“In those big waves, we weren’t able to see him,” says James Miron, Coast Guard boatman second class, who led the Coast Guard search. It was five hours before the boy was located; a park service ranger swam out to him, but he had already drowned.

After such losses, the Coast Guard offers special programs to help the rescuers process the experience.

“The amount of emotion we need to work through depends on the amount of contact we had with the victim,” James says. “It’s heartbreaking to not succeed in a rescue and, in particular, to lose a child.”

Julie Buckles, an avid paddler, wrote, Paddling to Winter, about canoeing from Lake Superior to the Canadian subarctic.