By Sylvia Durres
Rob Kurdy and his friends were sharkfishing in the Long Island Sound June 11 when they spotted something protruding from the water.
As they steered their boat closer, it soon became apparent it wasn’t the fin of a Great White—or any edible sea creature, for that matter—but rather, the antlers of an exhausted deer.
“Here’s a freakin’ buck swimming out in Long Island Sound,” Kurdy said while approaching with his fellow shipmates.
“You could see it shivering,” he told WTNH News 8. “It was barely staying afloat, kind of just going [around] in circles.”
The Woodbury resident and his friends decided to gently lasso the water-logged mammal’s antlers with some rope and tow it to the shore of a Madison, Conn. beach, with Kurdy hopping into the water to help the hoofed critter ashore. After several hours nestled snugly beneath some blankets that local neighbors brought, the deer ultimately walked away a survivor.
Reflecting on the rescue to WTNH, Kurdy explained that making the hurried detour to assist the unlikely long-distance swimmer was the right thing to do.
“It’s a life,” he told the media outlet. “I’m not going to let him drown. He was out in the middle of nowhere, shivering and freezing, so we all said ‘We just can’t let it drown.’
“It was the right thing to do.”
Kurdy’s dramatic deer rescue was making the rounds across social media Friday, with visitors to Kurdy’s Facebook profile praising him as a hero.
Watch The Harrowing Long Island Sound Deer Rescue:
Photo: Rob Kurdy of Woodbury helped rescue a deer that was struggling to swim about six miles from shore in the Long Island Sound. (Rob Kurdy Facebook profile)
