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WARWICK — It was still fairly sunny when Richard Martin, out for an afternoon of fishing with his son and daughter and two of their teenage friends, decided to tie his 16-foot boat to the side of Conimicut Point light in Narragansett Bay.
He felt it would be a safe place to be if the weather took a turn.
And turn it did. Between 4 and 5 p.m., Martin and the four teens who had been fishing for tautog for about an hour faced a storm front moving in.
“Dark rain clouds came in. I didn’t take it seriously until it was too late,” Martin recounted later. As the waves picked up, Martin realized the bow of his boat should have been facing into the wind, but he couldn’t get the boat around. “The waves were crashing into the back of the boat.”
For a brief moment, Martin, 39, a painter by trade, his son Richard, 17, daughter Brittney, 15, both students at Veterans Memorial High School, and their two friends, Sara Mills, 17, and Drew Wagner, 18, considered making a fast run for the shore, but decided to stay where they were.
“Thank God, we did,” Martin says.
With the wind increasing, the five climbed up a ladder at the side of the lighthouse, and were barely able to hold on. “It felt like we were going to be blown away.”
The door to the lighthouse was locked, but they broke the lock and found refuge inside. It was then that Martin’s wife, Nicole, got a frantic cell-phone call from her husband asking her to call 911. “I was very scared,” she said later.
The Warwick Fire Department got the call first, and as it was sending a boat, a Coast Guard vessel at Castle Hill and boats from Cranston and East Providence were activated as well.
Just after 5 p.m., Martin said, the storm was gone, but so was his boat.
Warwick rescue workers picked up the five and brought them back to where they had set out for their afternoon of fishing, the boat ramp at Oakland Beach.
“I just bought the boat last year,” Martin said of his sunken vessel. “But I’m so glad that we all got out safely. Tying up next to the lighthouse was the best decision we could have made. If we were out in the open water, I don’t know what would have happened.” Nicole said three hours after the incident that she was still shaking.
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