Life Jacket Saves Man

[GutshotApe]

According to an article in today's Eugene Register-Guard newspaper, Jack Mather of Winchester Bay owes his life to his life jacket. On tuesday afternoon Mather was towing drift logs with an 11' boat when a wave swamped him and the boat immediately sank. He tried to swim for shore but couldn't make it (he has only one arm) so he grabbed onto the 30' log and hung on. The tide was going out and he was about 10 miles above the mouth. He drifted along for about 4 hours and saw or heard nobody along the way. But as he passed the inlet to Winchester Bay/Salmon Harbor he began yelling "Help...Coast Guard...help!" Luckily for him, a Coastguardsman, petty officer Ian Washington, was outside the Coast Guard station which is about 1/4 mile inside the harbor...and heard the faint cry for help. The Coast Guard crew jumped into a 23' boat and found Mather drifting downstream in the river a few hundred yards off Orc Point, about a mile from the breakers at the bar. Besides his life jacket Mather was wearing several layers of clothes...but he was hypothermic and barely able to move...his speech was slurred. "The life jacket was probably the only thing that saved his life" one of the Coasties said. Mather was taken to Lower Umpqua hospital, treated for hypothermia, and released. :smile:

[ampersat]

Words that could sell thousands of life jackets:
Treated and released.

Those words don't often follow stories of those not wearing a life jacket of some kind when an accident happens on the water.

Don't think it'll happen to you? As my mom used to say (and she worked in the insurance industry for twenty plus years): that's why they call them accidents.

[id. painter]

The one single statistic that stuck for me was ,,, Nobody has died on the Clearwater ,,, who was wearing a life jacket. There was about one a year who died without. id. painter