After a close call in the frigid waters of Minnesota’s Lake Minnetonka, Jack Doty is urging fellow boaters to avoid the mistakes that nearly cost him his life. This month the lifelong boater shared his cautionary tale on The Qualified Captain podcast.
Doty was ejected from his boat into the 39-degree waters of Lake Minnetonka, just two weeks after ice-out in April 2022. Even before he hit the water, Doty realized he was in a race against time.
“As I was flying out, I knew I was in serious trouble,” he said. “I’m like, this is how you die.”
His next thought was escaping the Whaler’s spinning prop. “I knew I had to get away from that boat,” said Doty, who estimates the prop passed within about four feet of him. “I took the full wake of that motor in my face.”
As a boater, Doty is as safety conscious as they come. In fact, he went out that day to acquaint himself with his boat’s systems, and check for buoys that may have moved when the ice left the lake. He always wears his life jacket and normally makes a point to attach his engine cut-off lanyard. This day, however, he was distracted with the electronics on his new Boston Whaler Dauntless 210, and skipped that simple step.
The forecast called for high winds later that day, but the storm came early, packing winds in excess of 40-mile-per-hour. Doty was making a long sweeping turn when he hit a wave and went overboard. Even at about half-throttle, the ejection was incredibly violent. Doty’s right hip struck the rail so hard it tore his gluteus muscle. “I actually bent the stainless-steel side rail and ripped the screws out of the gelcoat,” he said. “I’ll give you 30 minutes with a sledgehammer. You won’t do that.”
As he left the boat, some part of Doty’s body pushed the throttle wide open, and the torque of the Verado 200 outboard pushed the helm hard over. The Whaler went into a tight spin and looped back toward him. Doty managed to swim clear of the circling boat, then pulled the handle to inflate his life jacket. He was momentarily safe from drowning, but his ordeal had only begun.
Doty watched in dismay as the few boats on the water that day high-tailed it for home without even slowing to investigate the Whaler spinning circles in the middle of the lake. He realized it was up to him to save himself.
The closest land was Big Island a few hundred yards to the west. But with the wind whistling out of the south there was little chance he could get there, let alone find help on the sparsely populated island. Instead he decided to swim with the wind at his back, aiming for the lake’s north shore a mile or more distant.
As he swam, he told himself over and over again, just keep working. “One of the nurses at the hospital was like, ‘That must have been so frightening,’” Doty said. “But it wasn’t scary at all. It was just very real – you’re either doing this or you’re not.” For nearly an hour in 39-degree water, Doty kept swimming.
Towards the end, his thoughts turned to his wife and two young children. “The world’s going dark. I am tired. I’m cold,” he told Stasiak on the podcast. “I’m like, I just can’t disappear. That’s all I was thinking at that point.”
With only his head and arms showing among the whitecaps, Doty should have been invisible to anyone on shore. But a man in a lakeside home went to wash his hands in his kitchen sink, and spotted Doty’s Whaler turning circles far out on the lake. It was the first in a remarkable chain of coincidences Doty described on the podcast.
“Thirteen years ago, he’s diagnosed with Stage 4B bone marrow cancer, and lives. And lives!” Doty said. “And, he used to work on yachts as a deckhand and was actually trained in how to scan water for objects. So what are the odds?”
The man called 911, and the Hennepin County Sherriff’s Office Water Patrol Unit went to investigate. Deputy Nathan Briguet remembers the scene when he and two volunteer deputies reached the Whaler. “There was nobody on board, so we began canvassing the area,” he said.
“We weren’t finding anyone.” After about 10 minutes, Briguet received a call from his dispatcher. The man on the hill had spotted what looked like a person in the water some 400 yards east of the patrol boat. Briguet turned the boat in that direction and caught a glimpse of Doty in the distance.
“I don’t know how I saw it but all I could see was just a hand wave over the horizon,” he recalled. “Sure enough, there he was in the water.”
The deputies got Doty out of the water and rushed him to the hospital, where doctors were astounded he had survived so long in the frigid water. “Every one of them said, how are you here?” Doty said.
To Briguet, the answer is simple. “He was wearing a life jacket when he fell out of the watercraft, and that 100 percent saved his life,” the deputy said.
Since the accident Doty has become an advocate for boating safety, and specifically engine cut off switches – both the traditional lanyards and electronic versions that can be worn like a wristwatch or clipped to clothing or a life jacket.
“If I had my lanyard on,” he said, “I would be beat up, cold, wet and maybe embarrassed, but the boat would have stopped. I could have swum back to it and climbed aboard.”Watch the full episode on The Qualified Captain Podcast.
