TRURO — Caitlin Egleson, a visitor here over the past two decades, is no stranger to Pamet Harbor. A strong swimmer, she’d recently taken to paddleboarding in a cove near the harbor’s parking lot.
On a recent trip, she began to teach the sport to her daughters: Twyla, 4, would stay with Egleson on one board while Penny, 7, captained the other. The family friend they were visiting, Chris Affleck, stayed on shore.
On Aug. 10, however, Egleson and her paddlers-in-training found themselves in a rapid current headed southwest with the outgoing tide. The current began to sweep Penny’s board away from her mother and toward a mooring field full of boats and the channel to the open bay.
“The intensity of the current was so surprising,” said Egleson, who is a family law attorney in Cambridge. “She got really scared.” Egleson aimed her board into the current and made a beeline toward Penny and the mooring field.
The Pamet River’s three branches join at the harbor and flow through a small inlet into Cape Cod Bay. The tide is restricted by road culverts along each tributary, but it flows more freely in the harbor itself.
After catching up to Penny, Egleson jumped in the water and put her daughters onto a single board. “I was holding onto the paddleboard that the girls were sitting on and the chain of a buoy,” Egleson said. “The current was pulling me so hard.”
Dawn White of Truro was kayaking nearby and saw that the family was in distress. She offered a rope from her kayak and helped to calm the girls down, Egleson said, but she couldn’t pull either child onto her boat.
Egleson considered letting go of the buoy and trying to “slalom” the board through the mooring field, she recalled, but kept looking for a better answer.
That’s when she saw Tony Jackett, Truro’s harbormaster and shellfish warden, appearing on a boat around the corner with Affleck on board. “It felt like a rescue movie,” Egleson said.
Jackett pulled the girls onto the boat, followed by their paddleboard. Egleson’s board had drifted away but she was wearing her life jacket, so the harbormaster handed her a rope and slowly towed her back to the cove. After the family was safely ashore, he went back out to retrieve the paddleboard.
Jackett then invited the family inside the harbor shack and gave the kids hard candies from the office’s “shark dish,” which is shaped like a shark and plays the theme from Jaws.
“All’s well that ends well,” he told the Independent.
Surprising Currents
Jackett has worked at the harbormaster’s office since 1997 and been harbormaster since 2023. He said that the Pamet estuary is increasingly popular with paddleboarders, kayakers, and inner tubers.
The current “fools everybody,” Jackett said — even experienced boaters trying to trailer their vessels on the town’s boat ramp. “It’s swirly right there,” he said.
Affleck lives near the harbor and told the Independent she has watched the tidal currents there for 20 years.
“I usually tell friends to be aware of the current, but mostly they think I’m a nervous Nellie,” Affleck said. “When I first came to Truro, I rented a house on the Pamet, and the owner of that property warned me about it.”
The harbor “looks so peaceful,” Affleck said, until swimmers find themselves drifting in an unexpected direction. “To go against it is harder than you expect.”
The worst-case scenario is a windy day on a paddleboard or skiff, when “the wind is pushing your whole body like a sail,” she said.
Egleson said she hadn’t known about the currents or seen any signs warning of the risk. One reason for the lack of such signs, Jackett said, is that the harbor facilities were designed for shellfishing and boating rather than uses more common on a public beach.
Jackett has also been rescued there, he said. On a windy November evening about 10 years ago, he was “taking the skiffs off and moving all the docks out for the season” and decided to use a skiff to paddle back to the boat ramp.
“That wind and current were strong enough that I could not paddle to the ramp,” Jackett said. “I was able to grab hold of a mooring, and I had to call somebody to come get me.”
Egleson said she had learned a lesson — and that Penny might have over-learned it. Her daughter declared that “I’m never going into the Pamet again unless Tony’s there,” Egleson said.
