Ren Dorr had just set a triple — three lobster traps attached by a single line — and was headed to his next buoy on Monday morning when he saw something that he didn’t expect.

There, five miles off the mainland town of Harrington, was a young deer. And it was in trouble.





“I’m sure he [had been] going from island to island or shore to an island and he couldn’t see or got caught in the current,” the 31-year-old Harrington lobsterman said. “He was just kind of going with the flow. He wasn’t trying to fight it or swim with it. He was just kind of floating along.”

To be clear, the buck was floating away from land, toward the open ocean. And due to the tide, Dorr knew that the deer had likely been in the water for at least six hours already.