Posted on 04/01/2015 1:59:19 PM PDT by BBell
Fortunately for the children caught in its sill, there was more than one teenage lifesaver out on the Pearl River Navigational Canal last Saturday. Two friends fishing there wound up pulling a 5-year-old girl to safety.
A.J. Holmes and his buddy, Josh Miley, both 19 of Bush, were out checking their fishing lines Saturday along the western edge of the Bogue Chitto National Wildlife Refuge. They were just about to check the last one they'd set when the saw a water sopped teen motioning to them from the bank just above a sill.
The soaked person turned out to be 16-year-old Leyton Page who had just managed to pull two young boys out of the churning water below the sill. The boys and their sister - along with their mother and her boyfriend - had toppled over the sill in their boat after it lost power.
Page told Holmes and Miley the adults and the girl were still out in the canal.
So Holmes and Miley took the outboard off Holmes' narrow, 12-foot boat and portaged it down below the sill. After reattaching his outboard, Holmes headed downstream after a man he did not know jumped in with him.
"So we went downstream and we found some hats and shoes floating down there but nothing else so I turned around and started back," Holmes said. "I was coming back up the river when Josh, who was on the bank, started yelling that he saw the girl."
The girl had popped up seemingly out of nowhere - Holmes, Miley and Page are all convinced she had been trapped under her family's boat, which, like Page's vessel, was still turtled out on the water caught in the sill's churn.
"A.J. was just coming around a bend but he was still a good
(Excerpt) Read more at nola.com ...
/johnny
I suppose a “sill” is some sort of spillway or damming structure on these canals?
pictures at the site
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