Professional Soldiers ® - Tenacity and Motivation

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Tenacity and Motivation

When you have reason to act...

A forty-six year old man swims for five hours to shore to save his family, in the dark. He will probably invest in an emergency radio signaling device if he replaces his boat.

Quote:

DEAL ISLAND, Md. (AP) — John Franklin Riggs swam for hours to reach help for his family, including two children, after their boat capsized in a storm.

Riggs climbed rocks along the shoreline in the dark and knocked on the door of the first house he saw early Wednesday.

“He came to the right house,” said Angela Byrd, whose dog’s barking awakened her. She found 46-year-old Riggs outside, soaking wet and barefoot.

“He said, `I’ve been swimming since sundown; I need help,’ ” she told the Daily Times.

Byrd called 911 and rescuers were soon on their way to the 16-foot Carolina Skiff that capsized near Deal Island, southwest of Salisbury on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Life jackets saved the boaters’ lives, Sgt. Brian Albert of the Maryland Natural Resources Police said.

A Maryland State Police helicopter hovered above the boat as firefighters from Deal Island, Mount Vernon and Fairmount in Somerset County and Westside in Wicomico County pulled alongside. The U.S. Coast Guard also was on the scene, Albert said.

Contessa Riggs of Washington said she clung to the boat for five hours with her 3-year-old son, Conrad Drake; her 70-year-old father, a retired commercial waterman also named John Riggs, and his 9-year-old granddaughter, Emily Horn, a fourth-grader visiting from the San Francisco Bay area.

“I’ve never been so happy to see search boats in my life,” she said Wednesday by telephone. “It took him five hours to swim ashore. He had to stop and grab a crab pot buoy and rest, then swim.

“We clinged to the side of the boat and got stung by sea nettles in the dark,” she said.

Riggs’ 9-year-old niece, Emily, calls Riggs a “real hero.” She added that the next time the family goes fishing, “I’ll go if the water is really shallow.”
(Copyright 2013 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

http://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2013/0...boat-capsized/

Side Stroke anyone. :D

S

Glad this one had a happy ending, lucky family.

So glad the family is safe.

I was thinking backstroke with a vest on. Glad he made it and the family is OK. that long in the salt weather though....

Best wishes to all of them and thanks to the lady that answered her door instead of chasing him off.

Rather than a new thread, thought to put an anecdote into this thread-title looking over the first page of fine topics (going back 4 years).

Encountered during a current read of Foote's 3-volume treatise on the "Civil War." (in quotes, as others have different names for it)

Before there was "don't start nothin' won't be nothin'", and before "Nuts" at Bastogne there was this (in 1862):

CSA Col. Kirby Smith's cavalry, ranging far & wide, encounters a Union detachment at Mumfordville KY. After brief contact, Smith suggests to the det commander - a Col. Wilder of Indiana 7th Volunteers - to surrender his garrison, but is rebuffed. Smith then asks Brigadier Gen Chalmers to lend weight of his brigade and, after another attack, Chalmers tries to encourage the Union det to surrender, paying honor to Wilder's "gallant defense" but that he should surrender "to avoid further bloodshed." Wilder's response in a note back to Chalmers:

"Thank you for your compliments. If you wish to avoid further bloodshed keep out of the range of my guns."

Colonel Wilder was a real innovator.

He mounted his troops so they became mounted infantry, and were known as the Lightning Brigade.

The War Department refused his request for Spencer repeating rifles. He then used his own factory as collateral to equip each of his men with a Spencer, and the troops signed vouchers for them.

His artillery was a mixed gun battery of 12 pound mountain howitzers for close in work and 3-inch Rodman rifles for long range work. The battery commander was Captain Eli Lilly. Yes, that Eli Lilly.

His mobility and firepower led to the Lightning Brigade frequently being used as a fire brigade, sent where the action was hottest.

During the battle for Alexander's Bridge at Chickamauga, COL Wilder led his Lightning Brigade in the defense of the bridge against a significantly larger Confederate force, primarily Walthall's Missisisppians. Wilder's troops repelled multiple attempts by larger forces to take the bridge, in some significant degree because of the repeating rifles and Lilly's Battery.

Walthall was eventually reimbursed the cost of the rifles, before he or his troops had to pay for them.

TR

Thanks sir; that is great stuff. Glad to know that I will encounter him later, since he did eventually surrender when a huge maneuver formation was finally brought to bear. But it would seem, in this case, the policy at times of wholesale parole of prisoners didn't work out so well down the road for the parol-er. ;)

(And, yes, am enjoying this particular set of books immensely.)