A fisherman was stranded and taking on water Friday night near Winchester Bay. His boat contained unusable lifejackets, expired emergency flares, no registration, no sound device and only one fire extinguisher.
But the problem was that he had only one bilge pump working to suck the water coming into his boat back out. The fisherman called for help at 9:46 p.m. Friday, and the call was caught by Coast Guard crews standing watch at the North Bend office.
They deployed a 47-foot motor lifeboat from the Umpqua River Coast Guard station. While the fisherman had said he could see the buoy for the entrance to the Umpqua River, the Coast Guard boat could not find anyone around the buoy.
So the people monitoring the radio in North Bend asked the fisherman to launch flares. The rescue crew saw the flares and traced a path to the disabled boat 3 miles north of the Umpqua River entrance.
The rescue workers sent a dewatering pump aboard the 65-foot fishing vessel, and once the incoming water was under control, they began to tow the fishing vessel back to shore.
It took until 4 a.m. — nearly five hours — to get the vessel to shore, where crews discovered all the problems with the fisherman’s equipment.
He must stay on land until he fixes the problems and then can finish his trip.
No one was injured during the rescue.
This is the second rescue last week by the Oregon Coast Guard. The first was by air. On Thursday, a helicopter crew found a man who got snowed in on a forested hilltop in Southern Oregon. He had been there three days and had hypothermia by the time he was rescued.
Lloyd Cline, 73, had some food and water but run out of propane and gas to heat his trailer on Monday.
Cline had been working security at the logging site near Drain in Douglas County when he became snowed in at about 1,400 feet elevation.
Cline was stranded 15 miles from the main road in 3 to 4 feet of snow.
