The life and death difference between this July 2 accident and the one only days earlier would prove to be a personal flotation device -- the so-called PFD.
Wasilla angler Christie Alexander was fishing from the banks of the Kenai near the Russian River landing on the July afternoon in question. She heard people start to scream and assumed a bear was near the popular fishery.
Over the course of the past several summers, grizzly bears have become regular visitors. They seek the carcasses of salmon unthinking anglers toss into slack water after filleting their fish.
Only this time, the problem wasn't a bear coming down the river, though ferry manager Dianne Owen said the dark object in the water looked like that.
"The bears get in the river and float down,'' Owen said. "That's what this looked like."
From the ferry landing, all Owen really saw was a dark, bobbing object rocketing downstream on the 4 or 5 mph current. From the opposite bank, Alexander had a slightly better view.
"A woman came floating around the bend to my right," Alexander said.
There was no boat in sight. Alexander thought the woman looked cold and frightened.
A lot of people on the beach were shouting for someone to do something.
Alexander, who was fishing for red salmon with her husband and son, didn't know what to do. Neither did anyone else.
"We were looking around on the bank, and my husband was wondering why there was no throw rope,' Alexander said.
Fortunately, on the opposite bank, a rescue was amping up.
Alexander could see a group of young men at the Russian River ferry station working frantically on an inflatable sport boat.
"One of them was pumping, but he wasn't just pumping," Alexander said. "He was going at it like there was no tomorrow. The kids on that raft . . . put a motor on it and rescued her."
"The kids'' would be a couple of good old boys -- or good young men -- from the Deep South.
One of them, Wesley Howell, hails from Starkville, Miss., Owen said. He is a student at Mississippi State University majoring in wildlife management.
The other was Brian Yarbrough from Oxford, Miss. He is a student at Ole Miss majoring in parks and recreation management.
Both came north to work this summer at the ferry, which hauls anglers from the Sportsman's Landing parking lot off the Sterling Highway to the far bank of the Kenai. There people stand shoulder to shoulder casting for red salmon much of the summer.
Fishing has been slow for good parts of this year, but Howell and Yarbrough can now claim they got themselves a special catch.
Owen thinks they deserve a little recognition. The woman they rescued wouldn't have lasted much longer in the glacially cold water of the Kenai, Owen said.
"She was pretty hypothermic. We got her out of her wet clothes and had a couple blankets on her, and I had a heater on both sides," she said.
Even then, it took her a while to warm up. "About three hours," Owen said.
Yet the woman was lucky.
"(Her) face looked like it was halfway under the water half the time when she was in the river,'' Alexander said. "She was looking like she really was getting cold.
"The story I heard later was that she was in a raft with her husband and got brushed out by a branch."
Fallen and falling trees, along with snags, dot the banks of the Kenai.
They are called "sweepers'' for their ability to sweep people out of boats.
Over the years, some people have been knocked into the water only to get entangled in branches, pulled under and drowned.
If, as others also report, the woman got knocked out of a boat by a sweeper, she was lucky to get clear. She was lucky too to have fallen in the river just upstream from the Kenai-Russian confluence, one of the busiest places on the entire river.
And she was doubly lucky to have Howell and Yarbrough downstream.
But hopefully it wasn't luck that got her into that PFD. Hopefully that was good judgment, as it should be for everybody playing on the cold, often fast, sometimes turbid waters of Alaska.
Because if this woman hadn't been wearing that PFD, Howell and Yarbrough and the rest might not have been able to do anything.
Alexander knows too well.
She heard about the disappearance of Yanoshek at the end of June, but she got a first-hand report when his body was finally found downstream near Skilak Lake almost a month later.
"My husband was in the fishing party that found that guy,'' she said. "We're pretty freaked out.''
It wouldn't hurt if everyone was a little freaked out. There is no better reminder of why it is a good idea to zip into that PFD.
Outdoors editor Craig Medred is an opinion columnist. Find him online at adn.com/contact/cmedred or call 257-4588.
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