The boat was a long ways off, but it was closer than the others they’d seen, he says.

Then it happened, something they’d been waiting nearly two days to see; the boat saw them and turned toward the island.

Onboard were Constable Jeff Prevett and Cpl. Stacy Morton of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachment in Thunder Bay, Ontario, who were patrolling the Minnesota-Ontario border. It was late afternoon, and they were just about to head back to Kenora, Ontario, nearly two hours away by boat, when Prevett saw something on shore more than half a mile away that piqued their curiosity.

A closer look revealed two bedraggled men and an overturned boat.

“It really was kind of a needle in a haystack,” Morton said in a phone interview. “We had to get in a lot closer and get the binoculars out because from where we were, it was just a tiny little speck on shore, so it was really just curiosity that brought us in. And then, through the binoculars, we saw the two gentlemen frantically waving away.”

Brott said he assumed the officers were on a search-and-rescue mission, but that wasn’t the case. The two men hadn’t even been reported as missing.

The island rescue was a first for both officers, Morton and Prevett said.