Search to continue Thursday for missing kayaker on Fox River
A search for a missing kayaker on the Fox River in St. Charles will resume Thursday, and is now a recovery effort looking for a body, not a rescue mission, authorities said Wednesday.
St. Charles Fire Chief Jeremy Mauthe said the department searched using cadaver dogs. On Thursday, it plans to utilize a specialized “rover” borrowed from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
Emergency crews responded shortly before 10 p.m. Tuesday to an area just south of Ferson Creek Fen for a report that a kayaker had flipped and disappeared.
The St. Charles Fire Department began a rescue operation on Tuesday night, searching the river for seven hours until around 5 a.m. Wednesday.
Besides using sonar and divers, rescuers searched the river’s banks and the Pottawatomie Park golf course overnight with drones equipped with heat sensors, Mauthe said. But there were no hits.
Crews resumed the search at 8:30 a.m. Wednesday.
Mauthe said at a news conference that the kayaker and another man were fishing in the river when he fell into the water around 9:30 p.m.
“It sounds like one of the kayakers tipped, fell out of his boat, and hasn’t been seen since,” Mauthe said. “The other kayaker was able to paddle safely to Ferson Creek.”
“The Fox River is a very dark and murky river,” he said. “It’s not a clean, easy river to search. It’s very wide. It varies in depth, and it has a lot of murkiness and muck inside of there.”
Illinois Conservation Police Cmdr. Joshua Mooi said they have interviewed the owner of a motorboat that may have driven past the kayakers.
According to IDNR spokesman Brandon Damm, the kayak was overturned by another boat’s wake.
However, Mooi said, “We do not know exactly what happened.”
Mooi said police do not know if the missing kayaker was wearing a life vest. The other kayaker was not wearing one, he said.
Mauthe and Mooi did not release any additional information about the missing person. However, they reported the kayak was found.
Mauthe said the department searched as far south as the dam, which is near Main Street (Route 64). At one time, there were seven rescue boats in the river, he said. They used side- and sector-scan sonar to map the bed of the river, he said.
Firefighters from 29 departments helped with the search Tuesday night, according to a city news release.
In the summer of 2019, the fire department in St. Charles did two rescues on the river. One was a group of three people on a paddleboat, who had taken refuge from a storm underneath a railroad bridge.
The other was of a family of three whose boat’s motor died about 1,000 feet from the dam. Their anchor did not hold, and the boat drifted downstream. Firefighters pulled them off their boat about 30 seconds before it went over the dam.
In 2014, one kayaker died and another was injured when their kayaks went over a dam in Geneva.
• Shaw Local News Network contributed to this report