Veteran cruise ship captain Dave Sliter was steadily guiding his vessel toward port along the Upper Peninsula's Lake Superior shoreline while his passengers marveled at the towering cliffs and the Bridalveil Falls off to their left.
Then something barely caught Sliter's eye from out a side window.
"It was the color yellow, a life jacket," Sliter said. "I saw it at the last minute."
Without hesitation, Sliter said, he changed course and locked his eyes on four people "hunched over and sitting upright" on the rocky beach of the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore and only partly out of the 47-degree water as a storm was building.
Floating in the water out of Sliter's reach was the Minneapolis family's plastic canoe, which held their truck keys, cellphones and other essentials when it was swamped in the blustery conditions.
The four, all wearing life jackets, swam 100 to 150 yards to shore and could only hope someone would see them as sunlight became increasingly in short supply.
That's when Sliter's ship drew near, and he radioed his Pictured Rocks Cruises office about 14 miles away in Munising, the Alger County Sheriff's Office and the National Park Service as the winds hit gusts of 25 miles per hour at roughly 8:45 p.m.
Realizing it would be foolhardy to nudge his ship any closer to the rocky waters, Sliter kept the vessel 200 to 300 yards off shore to "let them know we were doing something" until two smaller rescue craft arrived on a lifesaving mission and brought to dry land Yonyalu Polinske, 43, and Tabithah Polinske, 47, and the two children.
