Last week, a good samaritan in Camden County, Florida, helped deputies rescue an angler who fell overboard near the St. Mary’s Lake Entrance Channel in the Cumberland Sound.
The man, identified only as Mr. Seymour in news reports, was fishing with a friend when he fell out of their boat while attempting to raise the anchor. His fishing partner called authorities for help when it became clear he couldn’t get back in the boat, but he called his friend first, knowing he was close and might be able to get there sooner.
Hunter Howell, also a local angler, told reporters when he got that call from his fishing buddy saying his partner fell overboard, he was indeed just minutes away from their location. He rushed to his friend’s boat to help.
“When I got there, all I saw was Mr. Seymour hanging on to the boat like this to the boat anchor,” he told ActionNewsJax. “I feared the worst when I tried to grab him and felt how cold he was.”
A video released by the Nassau County Sheriff’s Office shows the incident unfold.
The water that day was about 64 degrees and Seymour, a man in his 70s, had been in it for almost an hour. He was so cold that he couldn’t release his grip on the boat-anchor rope that he’d been clinging to for dear life. Fortunately, he was wearing a personal flotation device (PFD) at the time of the accident.
“I pried his hands loose, and that’s when Nassau County got his boat in close enough for me to transfer him over,” Howell said. The deputies and Howell pulled Seymour aboard — he showed signs of severe exhaustion and hypothermia, but is expected to recover, authorities said.
After the rescue, when the Action News Jax reporter asked Howell what he would be doing now, he said, with a smile, “We’re finna go back fishing.”
According to U.S. Coast Guard statistics from 2018, there were 4,145 reported boating accidents in the U.S. with 2,511 reported injuries and 633 deaths on U.S. waterways. Most of those deaths, 77%, were due to drowning, and 84% of those drowning death victims were not wearing a PFD. That’s a long way of saying that PFDs save lives and this story illustrates that you never know what could lead to an accident and a life-or-death situation on the water.
