Teen stops out-of-control, empty motorboat on New Hampshire lake

A teen is being hailed for fearlessly leaping into an empty, out-of-control motorboat and bringing it to a stop after its occupant was knocked overboard in a New Hampshire lake.

Boaters on Wednesday afternoon at Smith’s Cove on Lake Winnipesaukee noticed a motorboat going rogue, spiraling madly and churning up water. A sailing instructor had been teaching about 20 students, using a tennis ball to show them how to turn and leaned over to fetch it from the water.

At that very moment, one of the students’ boats tipped over and its mast hit the vessel’s throttle, knocking the instructor into the water. That left the boat unmanned.

“I can hear an engine revving, and I looked down the end of the dock toward the noise and saw a boat circling, circling, circling, and no one was in it,” said Rich Bono, a resident who was on his dock and filmed the incident on his phone. “Obviously, that’s not good.”

Brady Procon, 17, and his father Jeremy Procon, vacationing from their Massachusetts home, saw the incident from their porch.

“I heard a loud engine noise, and we looked over and we saw a boat just doing circle after circle after circle,” the dad told WHDH-TV.

Father and son sprang into action, heading onto the water in their own craft to get closer to the raging motorboat. They got the sailing students out of the way and maneuvered next to a neighbor’s jet ski, and Brady jumped on. Then the neighbor, Justin King, moved in close to the motorboat and Brady took his flying leap, landing on the vessel and stopping it.

No one was hurt and nothing was damaged.

“If it hit that dock, it would have ricocheted off and probably hit somebody’s house, dock, or people,” Brady told WGGB-TV in Massachusetts.

“One misstep and he would have been taken out by the prop of that boat,” Jeremy Procon said. “He had one chance to get it right.”

“It didn’t go through my mind what could happen if I missed the boat,” Brady told WHDH. “It seemed like an easy task that I could have done in that second.”

Brady, who plans to enter the U.S. Navy in the fall, said he didn’t feel like a hero in spite of the praise from locals.

“They were calling me a hero, and all that, but I wouldn’t say I’m a hero,” he told WGGB. “I think anyone would have done that if they had that opportunity to do it.”

With News Wire Services