By Julia O’Malley
Anchorage Daily News
Copyright 2007 Anchorage Daily News
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News
TURNAGAIN ARM, Alaska — A teenage kayaker, thrown from his boat into Turnagain Arm currents so strong they sucked the clothes off his body, caught a lucky break Sunday afternoon when a Alaska State Trooper helicopter happened by.
Sean Hickey, 19, had been kayaking with a friend on the sunny afternoon, when the rapidly shifting tides propelled a wall of water called a bore tide his way, catapulting him from his boat. He had a dry suit on the upper half of his body. The rushing, frigid water quickly caught and dragged him into a whirlpooling channel, away from his companion and his kayak.
There was no swimming to shore; he was at the mercy of the Turnagain Arm’s notorious, violent currents, pulling him toward Portage.
Around that same time, high above the churning water, trooper Bryan Barlow was riding in a rescue helicopter, scanning the Inlet. He’d been busy all afternoon with false alarms. First there was a report of people stranded on a sandbar near Indian, which turned out to be driftwood.
Then he’d been sent to a second Turnagain Arm call near Portage, which turned out to be no big deal.
He was headed home when a call came in from a trooper on the highway: He’d spotted a kayaker towing an empty boat. The kayaker said someone was in the water, lost in the current.
Barlow turned the chopper around and made a pass over the arm near Bird Flats. In the silty water, he zeroed in on the wet head of a man, who was waving frantically.
“He was a half mile from the shore, out in one of the channels, flowing pretty quick. The tide was really running,” Barlow said.
The helicopter positioned itself above the man in the water, hovering low and plucked him to safety.
Hickey had been in the cold water more than 10 minutes, and the effects of hypothermia had set in. The current had torn the clothes from the lower half of his body, Barlow said.
In a normal situation, it would have taken them a half hour to get to him, Barlow said. And they would probably have been too late.
“This could have been a very different outcome had we not have been called out for another call,” he said.
Hickey was treated by an ambulance crew in a pull-out and released. He couldn’t be reached later Sunday, but a page on the social networking site MySpace.com for someone of the same name and age described a student at Alaska Pacific University who recently moved here from Connecticut and is majoring in outdoor studies.
“He was definitely grateful we were able to get there quickly,” Barlow said.