By Jamie Hale | The Oregonian/OregonLive
The Coast Guard and civilian boaters worked together Friday morning to rescue six people from the mouth of the Umpqua River on the central Oregon coast.
The Coast Guard station at Winchester Bay received a distress call at 5:40 a.m. Friday, after a 24-foot pleasure craft sank while trying to cross the Umpqua Bar, sending six people into the 60-degree water.
The boat took a hard wave across the bow, which broke the windshield and flooded the vessel, the Coast Guard said in a news release. Five of the passengers put on life jackets before entering the water, while the sixth clung to a floatation device.
Coast Guard crew members aboard a motor life boat were refueling at a nearby pier when the distress call came in. When they arrived, they found three people still hanging onto the boats and the fourth – clinging to the flotation device and therefore unable to effectively swim – drifting away toward the ocean.
“We were most worried about recovering that survivor in time,” Petty Officer third class Aaron Hadden, coxswain aboard the rescue boat, said in the news release. “When hypothermia takes over and a person loses consciousness, at least with a life jacket, their head would still be held above the water.”
The crew was able to pull all four of the remaining survivors from the water, with no injuries reported in the incident.
The boat sank at the tip of the Umpqua River Jetty and is deemed unrecoverable for now. Read more:
