A pair of good Samaritans rescued a kayaker knocked into the Potomac River without a life vest during a sudden thunderstorm last week.
The kayaker, an older man who has been paddling the Potomac for the last 25 years, had been caught off guard by heavy winds and rain on June 11. Forced out of his kayak by the waves, he was left stranded in the river and unsuccessfully tried to catch the attention of several other vessels before boaters Orlando Karpf and Madison Cutlip heard his cries for help.
“I don’t know what would have happened had you not heard me when you did,” the kayaker wrote in an email shared with ARLnow. “I had been in the water for quite awhile and had developed a game plan for when the storm let up. Who knows when that would have happened and what condition I would have been in when it did.”
Karpf recalled that he was taking Cutlip, her mother and some other passengers on a cruise from The Wharf in D.C. to Georgetown when he hit some unexpectedly strong winds that evening.
“It was a beautiful day, and then that storm came out of nowhere,” Karpf told ARLnow. “I look over to the west, and I’m like, dude, those clouds look pretty gnarly. I’m like, we should probably get moving.”
Karpf had Cutlip, his girlfriend, take the helm while he attended to some canvas that was flapping in the gusts. He was on the upper level of his vessel, roughly in line with the Washington Monument, when he heard someone shouting for help.
“A few seconds later, I hear it again — and that’s when I lock in onto the dude who’s, like, floating in the water,” he said.
Karpf rushed to the helm to tell Cutlip, who immediately tied a throwable device to a rope and tossed it into the water amid the downpour.
The man in the river grabbed hold. Appearing “completely exhausted,” he had to catch his breath for a couple minutes before he was able to pull himself up to the swim ladder and climb aboard.
The kayaker, a Herndon resident, said he usually paddles the Potomac about two or three times a week and is attentive to the weather. Like Karpf, however, he didn’t realize how strong this storm would be.
He said the sky darkened as he was heading past Memorial Bridge, trying to reach an inlet. By the time he was midway there, “the wind and waves were coming sideways.”
“I almost made it to the inlet when I was hit with 3 successive waves which filled the cockpit and I went in,” the kayaker wrote. “Unfortunately, once I was able to get out of the kayak and surface, the kayak was beyond reach.”
Left adrift in the middle of a thunderstorm, he said he called out to several other boats, “but they couldn’t hear me yell for them.”
“Quite frankly, the fact you were even on the river in that storm, and someone must have been outside the cabin in order to hear me, was somewhat miraculous in itself,” the kayaker wrote. “Again, I don’t know what would have happened had you not come along. I do know that because you did, took the time to rescue me and make sure I was OK, I am in a position to thank you.”
Once the man was safely on the yacht, Karpf radioed a distress call and got in touch with the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary, who met them at Columbia Island.
Karpf, a boat captain who runs a boat rental business, said the experience hammers home the importance of safety on the water.
“People really underestimate the river,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how experienced you are, you’ve got to be careful, especially [with] these crazy storms that we get.”
Karpf said he’s still processing the whole experience.
“It’s still kind of shocking to realize, like, s—, man, I actually saved someone’s life,” he said.
