TERRITORY 3 INDIAN PURCHASE – Firefighters in cold-water rescue suits saved a 20-year-old snowmobiler from drowning after he fell through thin ice on Ferguson Lake shortly after noon Friday.

Jonathan Thibodeau of Medway was badly hypothermic but still conscious and moving when Millinocket firefighter-EMTs Tom Picard and Addison Matthews found Thibodeau and hauled him to safety. He had been in the water about an hour, state Game Warden Andrew Glidden said.

“We nearly lost him. It was very close. He was about a half-mile out,” Millinocket Fire Chief Wayne Campbell said Friday. “He was going to drown.”

The near-fatality underscores why people should stay off lakes and other waterways during this mild winter, Glidden said.

Thibodeau was in an area of Ferguson Lake that connects to Quakish Lake and through which the Penobscot River’s West Branch passes, Campbell said. It is called the main thoroughfare for its fast-moving, turbulent waters, which seldom ice over even in zero-degree weather.

Temperatures ran into the mid- to upper 30s most of the day, hitting 41 degrees Fahrenheit at 3 p.m.

“It will freeze over one day and break up the next,” Campbell said of the main thoroughfare. “I’m not going to pass judgment on anybody, but he should not have been out there. It’s never good out there.”

Thibodeau was undergoing treatment at Millinocket Regional Hospital late Friday afternoon. Information on his condition was not immediately available.

The incident began, Glidden said, when Thibodeau and three friends went ice fishing. They brought two all-terrain vehicles and the snowmobile. They were about 75 yards from the nearest shore on their vehicles and the lake ice was about 6 inches thick when Thibodeau sped off on the snowmobile.

The ice was about an inch thick where he fell through, Glidden said.

His friends used ropes to try to rescue him before firefighters arrived. Picard, a part-time firefighter, and Matthews were suiting up in the ambulance on the way, Matthews said.

With Glidden and several firefighters trailing safety ropes behind them, Picard and Matthews began the half-mile walk to Thibodeau. It was slow going in the heavy, waterproof neoprene suits, Matthews said.

The firefighters hauled Thibodeau a quarter to a third of a mile through water and ice onto a stretcher-basket attached to an ATV that Matthews said belonged to one of Thibodeau’s friends but Glidden said was state wardens’ property.

“Everybody did a fantastic job,” said Matthews, 43, of Millinocket, a 25-year firefighting veteran. “In a situation like this, it takes everybody you have to get it done.”

There was some question about where the accident occurred. Glidden pinpointed it as being within Ferguson, yet within Territory 3 Indian Purchase, while firefighters said it was on Quakish Lake in Millinocket close to the West Branch inlet.

It is not easy to tell exactly where the accident was. Ferguson and Quakish lakes are interconnected bodies of water. Ferguson Lake is rather circular, about a mile at its widest point and southwest of the downtown area of Millinocket. It connects to the west with Quakish Lake, which is about 2 miles long and a mile wide, through two narrow inlets near the West Branch connection point. Both are west of Shack Hill, and the Millinocket town line runs north to southeast through the eastern third of Quakish before following the West Branch almost directly south.

What was less difficult to see was that Friday was no day for Thibodeau to go snowmobiling, particularly on those waters.

“Even if it was 30 below, he took a chance on going into the water,” Matthews said.

BDN photographer Gabor Degre contributed to this report.