This tale is about my first ice rescue in two years time.

It was a Monday, Feb. 29, 1988. I was working the day shift at the Hopkinton Fire Department. At that time, we had two men on duty, and the chief was in and out. This afternoon, he was out.

In the early afternoon, an excited Spring Street resident called, telling us that three men had fallen through the ice while fishing. One of the men had managed to pull himself out and crawl to shore, and he was able to get to the home from where the homeowner had called us.

We sounded the alarm, and about eight of us proceeded to the scene in the rescue truck, the ambulance and our pickup truck, which pulled our flat-bottomed aluminum boat on a boat trailer.

Arriving at the scene, we pulled the boat about 100 feet through the woods to the shore.

One of the men still was in the water. The second man was on a small island. The third man was in the home where the emergency call was made, getting himself warm.

Two of our men donned new cold-water rescue suits that we had never used before. With a line tied to each of them, they crawled to the man in the water and, with some difficulty, pulled him to onto the ice and then to shore.

We had a 3-foot diameter wooden spool with half-inch line rolled on it, which we set up so we could reel the line off. We tied it to the boat. Two of us got in the boat on the ice, one on each side with one leg in the boat, the other pushing us across the ice. We got to the island, wrapped the man in a blanket, put him in the boat and successfully pushed him to shore without breaking through the ice.

We put the three men in the ambulance, which we had left with the heater on high, and took them to the hospital to be checked out. They were all OK!

We all received commendations from the Board of Selectmen a couple of weeks afterward for our efforts.