Last month, on the afternoon of Mother’s Day — a warm, sunny Sunday — Jeff Nichols, a part-time charter boat captain, found himself in the middle of a nightmarish scene.
Wolfpack, his 26-foot-long center-console fishing boat, had broken down about six nautical miles south of Montauk Point with two guests on board, and despite calls and cash offers to multiple towing services, he recounted in an email last week, “no operators were willing to come.” To combat the heavy winds blowing them farther offshore, he dropped anchor, causing the boat to rock dramatically — and sending one of his passengers into a blind panic.
“He was shrieking [that] we were going to die, and moaning,” Captain Nichols continued. The passenger, who he later learned had recently undergone a hernia operation, also complained of abdominal pain, and said that he was bleeding from his stitches coming undone. And though the air temperature was in the 60s, “the water was still 48 degrees,” he added. “If one of us fell over, we would have drowned.”
The Coast Guard was responding to another situation near Greenport, and would have had to travel back to its station on the other side of Montauk to switch boats before circumnavigating the tip of Montauk to reach them. So East Hampton Town Marine Patrol Officers Derek Paulsen and Drew Smith, on routine patrol near Navy Beach, set off to intercept the boat. Officer Smith went on board to assess the passenger, and the Marine Patrol vessel towed the boat to West Lake Marina. A safety inspection found no violations, and the passenger ultimately refused further medical attention, his panic having subsided back on solid ground.
The rescue was technically outside of Marine Patrol’s area of responsibility, which does not extend beyond state waters (one mile offshore), but the situation highlights the crucial, synergistic role they play in ensuring all distress calls are responded to in as timely a manner as possible.
“The water rescue agencies in the Town of East Hampton, in order of who would take command of any scene, would be the Coast Guard, then the Marine Patrol, and then East Hampton Volunteer Ocean Rescue — we can’t forget them, because they serve a very important piece of the rescue equation,” explained Commanding Officer Timothy Treadwell, Harbormaster of the Town of East Hampton, in a phone call last week.
Search and rescue cases — SARs for short — must involve “actual distress,” he emphasized. “Like, had we not responded, it could have had a bad outcome.” Marine Patrol responded to a total of 18 SAR calls in 2024, a considerable jump from the 11 they had in 2023, or the nine in 2022. “I mean, that’s what’s kind of interesting about it, right? You never know — you could go months with nothing, and then all of a sudden, in the same period, you have multiple cases.”
Two weeks after Wolfpack broke down, on the afternoon of May 31, Marine Patrol responded to a call for help from the operator of a sailboat called Half-Way There, who had been attempting to sail from Three Mile Harbor to Hog Creek. Finding himself suddenly “beset by weather” he attempted to turn back, but was hit continually by waves and unable to steer his boat to safety in either direction. When officers reached him he was “drenched and cold,” but was able to navigate back to Three Mile Harbor with Marine Patrol’s escort. The operator had to wait until the next day, after the weather had passed, to get his boat back to its slip at Clearwater Marina.
“Quite often, just like in the lifeguard world, it’s not the days where it’s really rough out that we are usually making a lot of SAR cases. It’s usually a day when everything seems okay, and then some squall comes in or the weather drastically changes,” Officer Treadwell said. The best way to avoid finding yourself in distress on the water, he advised, is to have information and knowledge about the area you are in.
He has been teaching boating safety courses for over 15 years, and held his last class of the season at the Montauk Library on Tuesday — the summer months are “all hands on deck” for all of East Hampton’s water rescue agencies.
“I like to teach the class locally because I can talk about our local waters, and how things work here,” he said.
“Most problems on a boat occur because of three or four factors,” he said in sum. “Take a boater safety course, communicate when you’re going to be out in the water, and have the proper safety equipment — I would say that those things would help everybody.”
