NAPLES — In the darkness, Edward Sorensen could hear the screams.

There was only a sliver of moon over Brandy Pond so Sorensen followed the sound, hoping he would reach the pair of men in time.

“They were screaming bloody murder,” Sorensen recalled. “I knew by the sound of it that they were in serious trouble. They were screaming, ‘Help us. We can’t last much longer. Please, God, help us.'”

It was Tuesday night off Jackson Cove Road in Naples. Sorensen and his wife, Roberta, were on the shore near their Cobby Road home when they heard the distress of two drowning men.

Edward is 79; his wife, 74. In the water, hundreds of feet from shore, were two much younger men who had flipped their canoe.

“I decided to row out,” Sorensen said. “I told my wife to call 911 and I went after them.”

The boat was a 12-foot aluminum number. Sorensen hoped he could maneuver it quickly enough to reach the men before their screams went silent. It was going to be a race against time.

“I had that rowboat going as fast as it could go,” Sorensen said. “I was rowing backward, if you can picture that. There was only a sliver of moon and it was pitch black.”

In the water, near Brandy Point, Chaz Price, 19, and Josh Garrison, 20, were losing strength. Their canoe had capsized and they were in the water with one life preserver between them. One of the men didn’t know how to swim.

“I kept talking to them: ‘Tell me where you are. Don’t stop talking,'” Sorensen said. “I was trying to anticipate what I was going to be facing when I reached them. My mind was racing at full speed.”

Sorensen reached the men at last, and when the rowboat pulled close, one of them tried to climb into the boat. Sorensen advised him to take a different course — to swim to the side of the boat and hang on rather than risk overturning the boat.

“I’m 79 years old,” Sorensen said. “I know I didn’t want to go into the water, too.”

The men hung on and Sorensen began the long row back to shore. From the water, he could see the flashing lights of police and ambulance vehicles, but because of a  miscommunication, they were headed toward the wrong spot.

Sorensen rowed and reassured his tired passengers.

“I told them, ‘Help is on the way,'” he said. “I tried to settle them. They had swallowed a lot of water. One of them told me he was going to throw up. They were pretty well done.”

The two men are from Ohio, police said, and had been staying at a camp on a different part of the pond. Sorensen, who has lived on the pond for 55 years, kept talking and kept rowing, headed back to shore as fast as he could.

Price and Garrison held on. Sorensen commended the men for watching out for one another and for assisting in their own rescue.

“They were digging really deep in order to stay alive,” he said. “They were not going to desert each other. They would have drowned together if it came to that.”

But no one drowned on Brandy Pond that night. Sorensen reached a dock with the two men in tow and rescue crews were on the scene shortly after. The men were wet, tired and shaken, but otherwise unharmed.

Attempts to reach them were not successful Friday night.

“They thanked me a hundred times, I swear,” Sorensen said. “They were so happy someone had come to help them.”

Days after the rescue, Sorensen ruminated about his role in it.

“A lot of people would say at my age, I shouldn’t get involved in something like that,” he said. “But when you hear screaming like that, I’m glad I did what I did. My wife and I, we’re elated that it turned out the way it did. The satisfaction of knowing that those two guys are still here on Earth, that’s all the satisfaction I need.”

The Cumberland County Sherrif’s Office was pretty satisfied with the outcome, as well. Brandy Pond has been the scene of at least three drownings in recent years. But not this time.

“It seems likely that at least one, if not both of these canoers came very close to drowning,” Sheriff Kevin J. Joyce said in a news release. “If it were not for the quick actions and selfless acts of Roberta and Edward Sorensen, this could have turned into a tragedy.”