This past week I went to the Coast Guard station in Michigan City, Indiana to help film a little video. The video is supposed to encourage people to sign up for the Coast Guard… they really need people and without them working our coastal waters become much more dangerous places. Here’s a story…
You have to imagine a gigantic guy with a bald head and a uniform on. He was a little timid about being filmed. You could tell he didn’t like talking in front of a camera. I’ve changed his language a bit to make the story easier to understand.
“So one day we were on duty at the station in Manistee and we got a distress call on the radio. There was a boat with three kids that were dying from carbon monoxide poisoning. They were somehow in the cabin on a little boat and the exhaust gas from the motor running got into the cabin. Their parents found them unconscious and called us on the radio.” I nodded, hearing the story. “The only information we had was more or less where the boat was, and that it was a white boat about 23 feet long. We raced out of the station on our fast boat and got to the spot where they told us to go. We found about 20 white boats about 23 feet long. You have to imagine us jumping from boat to boat, ‘Is this the boat with the kids on it? Is this the boat with the kids on it? Is this the boat with the kids on it?’ Finally, we found the boat.
There were 3 little kids, all nearly dead. They were conscious and unconscious, their parents were crying, and the kids were having convulsions. We breathed them up as best we could, hustled them onto our fast boat and headed back to Manistee where the ambulance was waiting. I was strapped to the back of the boat holding this little kid bouncing over the waves. The poor thing was having seizures in my arms.
We got them to the ambulance, and they raced them to the hospital. All three kids lived and were given back to their parents. That’s one of my stories.
Wow!
Not a bad day’s work, I think.