ST. STEPHEN, New Brunswick (AP) – A 52-year-old engineer still has his life, and a Saint John teenager who rescued him has a new canoe, in the wake of a near drowning in the St. Stephen area.

While the victim thrashed in the water some six yards from his up-ended canoe and more than 250 yards from shore, some adults on the beach punched 911 into their out-of-range cell phones.

Others tried to coax life into the outboard motor of a nearby boat. Still others piled into a car and drove off to fetch a gas tank for the boat.

Only Paul Howes, a 16-year-old high school student, saw a solution. He donned a life-jacket and grabbed a flotation “noodle” – a long tube made of foam – and swam out.

The mishap occurred on the St. Croix River at an artificial lake known on the Canadian side as the Grand Falls recreation park and campground, but on the U.S. side as the Grand Falls hydroelectric power generating station.

All that separates Canadian swimmers and boaters here from the hydroelectric dam in Maine is a boom of logs.

Campers on the beach had watched the inebriated man struggle to point his green canoe into the wind and move it upstream to where his campsite was, Howes said.

Although the boat had an electric motor, the weight of the man and two batteries in the back lifted the front out of the water.

And every time he managed to point the canoe upstream, a gust of wind would spin the raised bow around like a weathervane and sail him toward the dam.

The boat eventually struck the boom with enough force to lift the bow high into the air, pushing the stern beneath the surface and swamping the canoe.

The terrified man tried to escape by swimming upstream.

Interviewed Monday at a construction site, the softspoken teenager shook his head at all the fuss the adults made. There wasn’t much risk, he said.

“Except for the long swim, I couldn’t see any.” But when he got to him, the man continued to thrash, unable to float with the noodle and keep his face above water.

Howes, who had driven with the others to get the gas tank, returned in time to peer through her binoculars and see her son handing his own life-jacket to the man. “That’s when I panicked,” she said. But her son was careful not to get close enough to be grabbed. He waited for the man to calm down before towing him to shore.

The man gave Paul Howes his canoe.

After the gang of campers hauled him up on the sand, the man hugged his young rescuer and gave him the canoe.