A man who was thrown out of a boat and into the chilly waters of Lake Superior last week and swam to a nearby island for safety is sharing more details of his wild story.
Pete Joice, 41, a web developer, music producer and father of three from Duluth, had traveled to Grand Portage in far northeast Minnesota last Friday for a fishing trip to Isle Royale National Park.
He and his friend Joe Modec stopped at the Grand Portage marina to fill up their boat with gas. Meanwhile, Joice’s father and 12-year old son left in a different boat to begin the 20-mile journey across Lake Superior to Isle Royale.
It was about dusk when Modec and Joice finally headed out on the lake themselves. They drove along shore a bit to get the motor warmed up, then turned and started heading across the lake toward Isle Royale.
Modec was driving. Joice was in the back. And he doesn’t even remember how it happened, but at some point, possibly after the boat hit a big wave, “I just ended up in the water, and I watched the boat go over the horizon,” he said.
Modec hadn’t noticed him going overboard. “You can't really hear anybody over the motors or the radio,” Joice explained.
Joice saw the nearest land, an island in the distance back toward shore, and started swimming toward it. He eventually stripped off his shirt because it was impeding his swimming.
Luckily, the lake was calm, with gentle waves only a few inches high. “I just kept my calm and cool,” he said. He doesn’t know how long he was in the water. But when he started swimming, he said the sun still hung in the sky, hazy from Canadian wildfire smoke.
Joice initially had estimated the swim to be about two miles. Now he says it may not have been that far.
Adrenaline kicked in. When his arms tired, he’d switch to another stroke, or float on his back to rest.
By the time he made it to the rocky island, a hazy moon was shining. He slid up on the rocks on his belly “like a penguin.” Night had fallen, and the water felt much colder.
“My teeth were chattering.” He worried about getting hypothermia, so he stripped off all his clothes except his sandals.
He started snapping branches off of trees to make a shelter to provide some warmth. Then he saw a search light on a boat sweeping the water. He grabbed a couple branches and began to wave them in the air, hollering, until they saw him.
Joice jumped in the water again, and swam out to the boat, driven by officials with the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. They took him to shore. By this time it was after 11 p.m.
Meanwhile Modec had contacted Joice’s father and son to let them know he had fallen out of the boat and was missing. They came back across the lake from Isle Royale, and searched for him in the dark, until they learned he had been found.
“I don't know if you’ve ever been boating in the dark, but it's kind of scary,” Joice said.
He said he could see his son’s panicked handprints pressed on the windshield of the boat, left behind during their search.
“My son broke his sandals in half because he was so worried,” Joice said. “You just don't realize how much people care about you until you see how much distress they're in when you're in distress.”
Lake Superior is notorious for its typically frigid waters and waves that can reach several feet high in windy conditions. Cook County Sheriff Pat Eliasen said Joice was fortunate the conditions were so calm, with relatively warm water.
“It was very unfortunate, but it was also very fortunate, because nobody was hurt,” said Eliasen. “Nobody lost their lives, and you know, it probably couldn’t have played out much better than this, actually, for an accident like that.”
And the Joice family even got some fishing in. The next day they returned to Isle Royale to finish their trip, and had even more good luck, catching a couple of fish.
