An autumn fishing trip off the shore of Staten Island turned tragic after a small vessel capsized in Raritan Bay, killing a 84-year-old man and leaving his 82-year-old boat-mate injured Tuesday morning, reports silive.com.
A trio of firefighters assigned to an FDNY vessel rushed to the Raritan Reach Channel, about three miles south of Staten Island’s shores, after receiving a “mayday” call at 10:35 a.m. from another fishing vessel, and arrived in time to save the 82-year-old man.
The firefighters, Chris Tucker, 39, Brian Murphy, 41, and Lt. Ed Poli, all assigned to FDNY Marine 8, were headed to another call, a report of a person in the water, near Gravesend Bay, when the mayday came over the emergency radio.
The mayday call told the firefighters that the boat had flipped by buoy 19, so the firefighters could pinpoint where to go and get to the scene in about three minutes, Tucker said.
“Once we pulled up on scene we observed one survivor holding onto, grafted onto the bow of an overturned boat,” Tucker said.
The firefighters said the boat — a 19-foot fiberglass vessel — may have flipped after its anchor line wrapped around its outboard motor, making it unstable.
Murphy and Poli threw out a life ring, but as Tucker recalled, “He was exhausted and didn’t have any strength, so he could not pull himself onto the ring and into the boat, so we maneuvered for what we call direct pickup…. We grabbed the guy and extracted him from the water, pulled him onto the boat.”
The man, who was still conscious but possibly suffering from hyperthermia, then told the firefighters about the second victim, Tucker said.
“We immediately began searching for that victim. We located that victim immediately. He was floating face down,” Tucker said.
By then, an NYPD boat had arrived on scene. Poli and Murphy jumped onto the NYPD boat and helped pull the second man out of the water. He was in cardiac arrest, the firefighters said, so they performed CPR and tried to revive him with a portable defibrillator.
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