People have been stopping by Brennan Bollard‘s parasail business, just to shake his hand.
“It’s a lot,” he said. “I can’t go anywhere without being recognized.”
The 34-year-old Sea Isle City resident has become a local celebrity because of his heroic rescue of a kayaker Thursday evening.
It was just before 7 p.m. Bollard had finished working at Sea Isle Parasail and was sitting with his brother watching a storm roll in on Townsends Inlet in Sea Isle City.
“You could see it on the horizon. The whole sky went black,” he said.
He spotted the kayaker on the sand bar as the winds picked up from about 10mph to about 40mph, he said.
The kayaker had paddled only about 10 feet away from the sandbar when the wind and agitated water caused her vessel to flip.
“Right when she flipped, I ran to my little boat,” Bollard said. “It was very clear that she was in trouble.”
He jumped into his 15-foot Boston Whaler and drove right to the woman, who was clinging onto her two dogs. The woman and her dogs all had lifejackets on.
“She passed me the dogs and I got them into the boat,” he said.
Then he had the kayaker hold onto the side of the boat and take a couple of deep breaths to calm down before she hoisted herself into the boat.
A crowd of people from the Townsend Inlet Yacht Club had been watching the rescue and were waving Bollard over. He dropped the woman off there and took his boat back to his dock.
“The conditions were so bad,” he said. “I wanted to get her to land as quick as I could and get my boat back to the dock.”
Bollard didn’t get the woman’s name.
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Stories by Allison Pries
Allison Pries may be reached at apries@njadvancemedia.com.
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