When Rick Lingon took his son and son’s girlfriend out June 18 on his sailboat on the Chesapeake Bay, they were expecting it would be just a short spin.
They set out from Bavon Beach in Mathews County about 5:30 p.m., thinking they’d be on the water for 30-45 minutes.
“It was just going to be a little cruise,” said Lingon, 62, of Richmond.
They were having a blast — sailing at a good clip in strong winds — when Lingon lost control of the 16-foot Hobie on a turn. The sailboat capsized and all three tumbled into the water, close to 2 miles offshore. Strong currents prevented them from righting the catamaran.
The three were stranded in the water for several hours, with two eventually picked up by the Virginia Marine Police and another by the U.S. Coast Guard. The day could have turned out much differently — but the Lingons and the Coast Guard credited several factors that aided their safe return.
First, all three boaters had a life jacket, and second, a family member knew what time they were expected back, and called for help when they didn’t return in time. The Coast Guard encourages boaters to take safety precautions that could be the difference between an inconvenient — or deadly — accident.
The group tried for about 45 minutes to flip the boat before Nick Lingon, 28, and his girlfriend, Kendra Brooks, 31, decided to swim to shore. Both are strong swimmers, even as it was Brooks’ first time on a sailboat.
Rick Lingon opted to stay with the boat and await their return. The father and son said they loved each other before they parted.
But out in the bay, the winds and waves were strong.
“We realized that we were not making much progress,” Nick Lingon said. “But we continued to swim until the sunset.”
At about 8:30 p.m., Nick Lingon and Brooks came to a channel marker — a pole with a marker on it — and decided to save their energy and cling to it. Nick said he knew that his mother would call for help. They were about an eighth of a mile from shore.
They worked to keep their composure as it grew dark, and tried to reach for a ladder that was just out of reach.
“I kept cracking jokes to try and make her laugh,” Nick said. “I asked her if she would ever get on a sailboat again, and she said probably so.”
Rick Lingon, meantime, worked to pull the catamaran toward shore, assuming Nick would soon be on the way with help. But when the sun started to go down, he said, he began to worry they couldn’t find him. So Lingon, an experienced boater who works in sales and marketing, decided to ditch the boat and swim.
“I thought I’m gonna make it to shore, that’s guaranteed,'” he said, knowing he was in good shape and had a life jacket. “Well, that didn’t happen.”
A shift in currents, he said, made the swim even more grueling.
Rick’s wife, Molly Lingon, didn’t join in the sailing that day, staying ashore to read her book. But when the group hadn’t returned by 6:30 p.m., an hour after they left, she grew concerned.”Rick always says to me, ‘You always think the worst,'” she said. “So OK, ‘don’t think the worst, don’t think the worst,'”
She got her binoculars, asked neighbors if they’d seen anything, and began pacing the beach. She called the Mathews County Sheriff at 7:15 p.m.
At about 8 p.m., Coast Guard Cmdr. Erica Elfguinn was with her family at a downtown Suffolk restaurant, finishing a Father’s Day dinner when she got the call. She quickly went home and began the search and rescue coordination.
Elfguinn, chief of response for Sector Virginia, got a Coast Guard C-130 search plane from Elizabeth City, as well as boats from Coast Guard Station Milford Haven and elsewhere. She coordinated with the Virginia Marine Police, the Mathews County Sheriff’s Office and the Abington Volunteer Fire and Rescue in Gloucester.
“I knew we would be in the thick of it,” she said. “We needed to look and find them fast, particularly because the sun was coming down on us at that point.”
Elfguinn said the rescue team had a picture of the missing boat provided by Molly Lingon, and good information about when the boat left and its probable direction. The Coast Guard plugged that into a modeling program to predict where the missing boaters might be.
“It’s constantly trying to determine where whatever we’re searching for — the search object — may have drifted to,” she said.
About 9:30 p.m., Virginia Marine Police Officer Kenneth Freeman was steering a 25-foot patrol boat near the New Point Comfort Split Channel #2-day marker when his partner heard shouting from the water. Freeman cut the engines back to neutral, quieting things down as they surveyed the water.
They found Nick Lingon and Brooks holding onto the day marker pole.
Nick Lingon told the officers that his father was with the overturned boat. But when they found the vessel at 10 p.m., it appeared abandoned.
“My heart pretty much sank,” Nick Lingon said. “Because he said he was gonna be with a boat, and he wasn’t. Your worst thoughts are running through your head.” Nick tried to stay positive. But when he relayed the discovery to his mother from the boat, he said, “saying she was in hysterics is an understatement.”
Though Rick Lingon had thought he could swim ashore, the tides were against him. The currents took him a mile and a half northwest from the boat. As he floated toward the wrong direction on the bay, he could see the boats looking for him miles south.
He began growing cold at about 10:30 p.m., which he knew wasn’t good, given that people can die from hypothermia — even in summer waters.
“I’m thinking, ‘Man, this is not the way I thought I was going out,'” he said. But he tried to stay positive. “I was swimming every which way but Sunday to get into shore, but I just could not do it. I kept saying, ‘I’m gonna do this Molly, I’m getting in for you honey, I’m gonna be there.'”
“But I will be straight up,” he said. “When I got cold, that’s when I thought I can’t control this one.”
It was pitch black with no moonlight, he said, but the search boats and planes were getting closer, but kept just missing him. “It’s kind of like a bad movie. I was screaming and they just couldn’t find me,” he said.
Finally, at about 11:35 p.m., a 45-foot Coast Guard response boat from Station Milford Haven came close enough to hear Lingon’s yells.
Coastguardsmen Fireman Timothy Price and Vice Seaman Cole Prybas, standing on the stern, thought they heard something. A second yell was more definitive. They turned the boat around and spotted Lingon with a searchlight, pulling up alongside him to take him aboard.
“We were all happy and excited to be rescued,” Rick Lingon said.
Elfguinn said she and the Coast Guard felt a similar sense of relief. “It was overwhelming to call Molly and let her know that we found Rick,” she said. “That this ended up in a rescue of this family is a wonderful thing…This is why we do what we do.”
Peter Dujardin can be reached at 757-247-4749 or at pdujardin@dailypress.com
