He just wanted to go for a swim

An Island Park resident caused quite a commotion early last month when he fell into the water. Both the Bay Constable and the Coast Guard were called in to help pull him from the marsh, off the shore from Empire Point Marina.

The resident was Teddy, a small sheltie dog.

The fiasco began last year with Hurricane Irene. Teddy’s owner, Cindy Lespier, had her Parma Road house severely damaged by the storm. For the past few months, contractors had been working at her house on repairs. Teddy is skittish and didn’t enjoy having all of the strangers in his house.

“He’d been scared for weeks,” Lespier said. “When he got the opportunity, he ran out the front door and just kept running.”

A little while later, around 2 p.m., Lespier’s son, Gino, got home from work and found out the dog was missing. He called his mother, who works in Baldwin, to let her know.

“So I immediately started packing up at work to go home and help find him,” Lespier said. “Then my friend called me two seconds later and said, ‘I think your dog is out. I just saw him run across Austin Boulevard, and he almost got hit by a car.’”

Lespier and her family were frantically searching up and down Austin Boulevard trying to find Teddy. What they didn’t know was that someone had already found him.

“The dog ran through our parking lot, ran down the gangway, ran to the end of the dock, and just took a leap of faith. Just jumped right in the water,” said Patrick Dolan, the general manager of Empire Point Marina, which is just off Empire Boulevard in the northern part of Island Park. “It was a first.”

Dolan and some of the other workers at Empire were standing at the edge of the dock, whistling at Teddy and trying to get him to come back to shore. But, being a skittish dog, he kept swimming, heading out towards the landfill in Oceanside.

“And when he was about 20 yards from the shore, he turned west and started heading towards the marsh area,” Dolan said. “That dog was swimming for at least 45 minutes.”

Meanwhile, Lespier was still out looking for Teddy. She was driving around by the 7-Eleven on Austin Boulevard, calling out from her car. She came across a man on a 10-speed bike and asked him if he had seen her dog. “He’s in the water,” the man replied.

Lespier said she was too scared to ask if the dog was still alive. She asked the man to take her there. “He said, ‘Follow me.’ And I just threw my car in park and I ran behind this 10-speed, through the condos parking lot, through the boat yard,” said Lespier.

By the time Lespier arrived, Teddy had already swam from the dock to the marshes. The Bay Constable and the Coast Guard were there and had boats in the water. The marina’s owner, Joseph DeVita, had called them.

“No one in the area really has a boat in the water this time of year, and we didn’t have a boat [available] to get the dog,” Dolan said. “So Joe took the initiative to call the Bay Constable, and then he called the Coast Guard, and they both responded. The Coast Guard was fantastic. And by the time the law enforcement showed up, the dog had made landfall.”

Because of the high grass in the marshes, the small dog kept disappearing from view. Dolan grabbed a pair of binoculars and went onto the roof of Empire Point and was trying to spot the dog. “The Coast Guard were wearing these big, red survival suits,” said Dolan. “And it was kind of funny because when they got close to the dog, the dog ran further away.”

By that time, however, it was starting to get dark. After about 30 minutes of standing on the dock, Lespier and her son got permission from the Bay Constable to come onto their boat. But because Teddy was so skittish, he kept running from the Coast Guard (and causing one of them to fall into more than one very deep puddle). He had run into the high grass on the marsh and couldn’t be seen.

“I was so scared that they were going to say to me, ‘The tide’s coming in, it’s getting dark: we have to stop searching,’” said Lespier. “Because then I know he would have died out there.”

But finally, Dolan spotted the dog in the marsh from the roof. He yelled down to the ground to Lespier’s sister, Patti Ambrosia, who had come out for the search. Ambrosia called Lespier on her cell phone and told her where the dog was.

Tired and cold, and hearing the voices of his owners, Teddy allowed himself to be caught by the Coast Guard this time. “When I got him back, they put him right in my lap and I just held him,” said Lespier. “And he was licking my face nonstop.”

In the end, the experience helped teach Teddy a lesson. On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, Teddy ran out of the house again.

“But this time I was home, so I ran out, and he was all the way down by the corner,” said Lespier. “But he just stopped in his tracks, turned around and started walking home.”