Local men aid kayaker in distress

NAHANT – Police said a 52-year-old Boston man was “extremely lucky” after his kayak capsized off Revere Beach and drifted to Bass Point in Nahant before he was seen and pulled from the water by two local men.”Somebody was watching out for him, let me tell you,” Nahant Police Lt. Thomas Hutton said Sunday. “If the wind and/or current had just been a couple of degrees to the East, his next point of landfall would have been England.”Nahant Police reported receiving multiple 911 calls at 2:53 p.m. Friday of a person drowning in the water off of Bass Point – the southwestern-most tip of Nahant – and people in the water trying to rescue the victim.Police identified the victim as Edward Slavin, 52, of Boston. Slavin could not be reached Sunday.Ryan McManus, 18, of Peabody and a recent graduate of St. Mary’s High School in Lynn, said he and a friend were in McManus’ father’s backyard at the Bass Point Apartments when they heard screams for help.”You could see his head bobbing out of the water, a few hundred yards out,” McManus said of the victim. Meanwhile, another man, Barry Lauzon, was wading out into the water.Lauzon, 39, of Swampscott, said he was at his girlfriend’s house on Bass Point Road taking the garbage out. He said he had thought he’d heard a cry about five minutes earlier, but he figured it was one of the many neighborhood kids screaming. Then Lauzon said he heard another cry for help and figured it had to be from the water. He said he ran down a path to the beach and stripped to his boxer shorts to get into the water.McManus said he ran down to the water over the rocks and started into the waves, grabbing a life preserver that somebody at the apartments’ pool had tossed down to the beach.McManus estimated he and Lauzon reached the man where the water was about eight feet deep.”He wasn’t doing too well to say the least, he was kinda, like, all panicked,” McManus said of the victim.Lauzon agreed.”He was sort of caught in a rip current, and we were just keeping on saying, ?we’re coming to you,'” Lauzon said. “He did not look good when we got out there.”McManus said he and Lauzon grabbed onto the man, made sure he was breathing, then started swimming toward shore. McManus’ friend Justin Lee met them in the shallower water and helped all three out of the water.”The victim was gasping and grasping at them,” recalled witness Honey Amirault, who was at the pool that afternoon.Nahant Police, Fire and Rescue and Atlantic Ambulance arrived on scene as the men got to shore.”They got (the victim) to land, and he was conscious and alert, very, very, very cold, and complaining that he had swallowed a lot of water,” Hutton said.The victim, Slavin, said he had capsized off Revere Beach and could not get back into the kayak. Slavin estimated that he had been in the water for an hour and a half, Hutton said. He said that Slavin was taken to Salem Hospital as a precautionary measure. A hospital representative said there was no record of Slavin in the system.Both Amirault and Hutton remarked that Slavin was extremely lucky. Not only did the wind and current bring him to pretty much the last possible piece of land before Great Britain, but Friday was also the opening day for the pool at Bass Point.”The life preserver or rescue ring they used to get him, if the pool hadn’t been open, that wouldn’t have been there,” Hutton said.Amirault agreed.”There was a reason God opened the pool that day,” she said. “Otherwise nobody would have heard this guy … and it was a happy ending because we thought we were going to witness a drowning.”Lauzon and McManus said they both suffered some cuts on their feet from running over the rocks but were otherwise fine. Both said they had never rescued a person from drowning before, although Lauzon, a bartender at the Tides, said he had saved two people from choking.”He was just lucky, extremely lucky,” Hutton said of the victim.