An iceboat zips along the Navesink on Saturday.
Thinking an iceboater involved in a crash had gone underwater, a Red Bank man jumped into Navesink River to find him Sunday, today’s Asbury Park Press reports.
The iceboat driver, though, had been ejected several hundred yards before the vessel crashed into a dock and fell through the ice, the Press reports.
From the story:
Channing Irwin of Red Bank, owner of Irwin Marine, had seen the boat
crash and slide underneath a dock. He did not see anyone come up out of
the water. He had not seen the racer fall safely onto the ice.
Irwin said he feared the man had hit his head and remained underwater, unconscious.
“Time was moving on,” Irwin said. “No one was visible in the water, so it was time to go and find them.”
Daniel Clapp, a member of the North Shrewsbury Ice Boat & Yacht Club, said he was the second person to get to the dock to help. He saw
Irwin get in the water and thought twice about joining him, he said.
Clapp said he and other ice boat racers, including the one whose boat had crashed, tried to get the boat out of the water.
When
Clapp expressed concern for the supposed victim, the man turned to
Clapp and said he was the owner of the boat and that no one was
underwater, Clapp said.
“I kind of looked at him,” Clapp said.
“You better tell him you were sailing that boat.” Clapp said to the
racer, pointing to Irwin underwater.
Clapp said the man later
told him he had thought Irwin, who was in the water for five minutes,
was trying to help untangle the boat’s rigging, Clapp said.
Irwin
was brought back to the boat club to warm up and needed no medical
treatment, he said in a telephone interview. “Just a hot shower,” he
said.
Irwin was not angry about the accident, he said during a telephone interview.
Irwin
said the racer approached him apologetically when he told him the ice
boat was his. “I said, “No problem, you’re OK,’ ” Irwin said.
“If I ever go in the water, I hope Chan Irwin is around, because I don’t know how many people would have done that,” Clapp said.
The article doesn’t specify which dock the vessel hit.
