Behind the Badge - Where is Your Life Jacket?
Where is Your Life Jacket?
District Game Warden James Myhre
As a game warden, I’ve had to deal with a variety of boating accidents or mishaps. From my experience, wearing your life jacket is key in surviving many of these incidents. It is important to wear your life jacket, or at least have one on the boat and accessible, should the unthinkable happen.
This incident happened in October 2002, when I was still a new warden and stationed in Bismarck. I had the privilege of working with warden Ron Maier on a regular basis who was stationed in Linton. One day in early October, warden Maier and I were checking waterfowl hunters in Logan County. We observed a group of three hunters on Wentz Lake that were hunting out of a boat. We checked the group as they came to shore along N.D. Highway 34.
The group consisted of two men in their 30s and a teenage girl who were staying at a nearby farmstead during their hunting trip. They said that they had shot some ducks and the teenage girl had shot a merganser. After checking their birds, we correctly identified the merganser as a Western grebe. We explained that a Western grebe was not a legal species to shoot. Then we checked their safety gear. All their life jackets were stored in a large metal dry box located in the back of their small duck boat. The dry box was bolted to the boat and had a series of many latches on top that had gotten a little rusty and hard to open.
We then asked to look at their life jackets. It took a minute or two for them to get all the latches open and access their life jackets, but they did have the appropriate number on board. We gave the teenage girl a verbal warning for killing the Western grebe and we also warned the group that their life jackets will do them no good if they can’t get them out of the dry box in a timely manner. Then we continued our patrol.
About 2 weeks later in the middle of October, the morning started out with a little wind that grew rapidly to 40-plus mph by 9 a.m. That night I received a call from warden Ron Maier who explained that a boat swamped on Wentz Lake that day. The boat had two hunters on board.
One of the hunters was found dead and washed up on shore later that along N.D. Highway 34 wearing a pair of waders. He did not have a life jacket on. The hunter’s dog was faithfully sitting beside him along the shore. The other hunter had not been found yet. The search was to continue immediately the next morning, and warden Maier requested my assistance.
I met with warden Maier the next day at Wentz Lake. We were joined by several other officers from other agencies in the area. We launched our boat and after searching for a short time, we found the boat belonging to the hunters. Only a couple feet of the boat’s bow was sticking out of the water. The boat was in about 8 to 9 feet of water with the back on the lake bottom. We soon realized that it was the same boat that belonged to the hunters we talked to about 2 weeks earlier. We scoured the downwind shorelines and found some decoys that floated away from the boat.
Then a team of divers arrived from Bismarck, and they scoured the area near the swamped boat. After some searching in the dark lake water with almost zero visibility, one of the divers bumped into the deceased hunter at the bottom of the lake. After the body was recovered, warden Maier and I hooked onto the swamped boat with our patrol boat and towed it to shore.
The two deceased hunters were the same two we talked to a couple weeks earlier. All the latches on the metal dry box were still closed. Because the dry box was bolted to the back of the boat, it was inaccessible when the boat swamped.
The safety equipment that could have saved their lives was ignored or inaccessible, even after getting warned weeks earlier. While the water was cold, they would have only had to float and drift with the wind a couple hundred yards where they could have walked up to shore. Life jackets would have increased their chances of survival tremendously.
When you venture out on the water watch the weather and make sure that you are wearing your life jacket or at least have one readily accessible. If you have your life jacket in the boat and it is not accessible, or you don’t know where it is, it will do you no good.