By Timothy Churchill,Staff Writer

BETHEL – Eric Wight was not particularly surprised when the call came in at 3 a.m.

The lake “was extremely windy and rough,” said Wight, who has operated the safety boat on Lake Richardson for “Appalachian Extreme” for the past three years. Appalachian Extreme is the 78-hour, 187-mile, multi-sport annual endurance race that begins in Canaan, Vt., and ends at Sunday River Resort.

Early Tuesday morning, Wight brought two teams of four canoes and eight paddlers to dryness and safety after he received a call asking for help from race staff at the South Arm Campground in Andover.

Wight, a former game warden, said he found the first team by cruising around in his boat while “flashing a light, hoping they’d flash a light back.” He spotted their light near Beaver Island around 3:45 a.m., he said, and they were on the shore about a mile from the starting point on Lake Richardson. Wight couldn’t land his boat because of rocks, but he got close enough to tell them to paddle across the lake to the Mill Brook boat landing. They did, meeting their support group there.

Wight found a second team at his home on the lake.

According to, Norm Greenberg, one of the founders of Appalachian Extreme, the second team decided to avoid paddling before even beginning the Lake Richardson stretch.

Between checkpoints at Lake Aziscohos and Lake Richardson, in the foul weather and dark, the group decided it should portage to the next checkpoint instead of paddling, Greenberg said. Portage it did, getting a bit off course and ending up, strangely, on Wight’s doorstep.

Wight said he found them there at about 7 a.m. upon returning from searching for them.

Wight joked that in all his years as a game warden, “I’ve never once had the people I’ve tried to rescue come and find me.”

He said he took the second team and their canoes to Metallic Brook, where they met up with their support group.

Wight “was pretty amazing,” Greenberg said, “because he was out there from Sunday night to Tuesday morning in the worst of conditions.”