Alert fishermen reel in one of their own

When a fellow fisherman bobbed helplessly in the North Fork of the Lewis River, Joe and Curtis Fontana made sure he wasn’t the one that got away.

On the morning of Oct. 7, the father and son hit the North Fork of the Lewis River at daybreak in search of coho salmon. Another fisherman ambled down a steep bluff to the river’s south bank near the mouth of Cedar Creek, quietly spending a couple of hours fishing nearby from a perch known as Blood Rock.

The Fontanas didn’t think much of it when the fellow reeled in his gear and headed up the bluff toward his car, Curtis said.

Then they heard the scream.

“It was the worst sight I’ve ever seen,” Curtis said. “He just smashed himself all the way down. When he hit the river, he pretty much went into a dead man’s float.”

The man, a 56-year-old retired drywall worker who preferred to keep his identity private, was bobbing facedown in the water. Curtis said he flipped off his shoes and dropped his wallet, preparing to dive in after him, when Joe told him the man had flipped over and was breathing raggedly. The river’s current was beginning to carrying him downriver.

Thinking fast, the Fontanas flipped their fishing lines into the water. One line hooked the man by the shoulder, the other by the leg. Carefully, they began pulling him toward shore.

“We just literally fished him in,” Curtis recalled in a telephone interview Friday from his home in Gresham, Ore.

A caller told The Columbian about the incident, saying the story has circulated widely among sport fishermen on the Lewis. Joe Fontana, 69, of La Center, has fished the area for many years.

The danger was underscored later that same day, when a fisherman drowned less than a mile downriver. A 43-year-old Vancouver man died after getting caught in the current while attempting to wade to the bank from a small island near the Happa Road Boat Launch.

After reeling in their fisherman, Curtis Fontana, 40, said he and his father called to a boater who helped pull the man out of the water. The man insisted he didn’t want medical attention, so Curtis covered him in a blanket and drove him to his home in the Amboy area.

On Friday, the man’s wife said he was recovering slowly from cracked ribs and serious bruising.

“Thank God they hooked on to him with that fishing line; otherwise he’d have probably drowned,” she said. “We’re really thankful to the two men. It was just miraculous that they were there.”