Caught in high water: Canoeist rescued from tree
Published: March 21, 2007
A 22-year-old Howards Grove man whose canoe capsized in the swollen Pigeon River was rescued Tuesday night after hanging in a tree above the fast moving waters for more than an hour.
Christopher J. Loffler was pulled from the tree by a boat crew and brought onshore about 7:50 p.m., said Sgt. Terry Cram of the Sheboygan County Sheriff’s Department.
Loffler was taken to St. Nicholas Hospital in Sheboygan to be checked out, Cram said.
Loffler and a friend, Andrew Riemer, 22, were in the canoe about 6:40 p.m. about 200 yards west of Sheboygan County Y, just west of Sheboygan, when the boat was blocked by an ice jam. They tried to turn the canoe, but it hit a stump and capsized.
Riemer floated to shore on the capsized canoe and ran to a nearby home, where the owner, Mike Muth, called 911.
Loffler, meanwhile, climbed into the tree, about a foot or two over the water.
Muth said ice near the County Y bridge chokes the river and floods a portion of his property.
“It is so swollen now, I’ve never seen it any wider than it is now,” he said. “It’s very hard to define even where the (river) bed is.”
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