A woman was safely rescued Saturday from the ocean off Acadia National Park after she fell into the water while watching waves crash into Thunder Hole.
The Coast Guard was notified at around 3:40 p.m. that the woman had fallen into the water from the rocky shoreline next to the park attraction, named for the sound waves make when they strike an inlet in the craggy shoreline along Ocean Drive.
The Coast Guard sent a vessel from its station in Southwest Harbor and, within a few minutes, located the woman and got her safely out of the water, according to Matthew Strickland, a spokesman with the Coast Guard’s Sector Northern New England based in South Portland. Strickland said the woman is believed to be 20 years old but he did not have additional information about her.
Waves in the Gulf of Maine have been bigger than normal this weekend due to Hurricane Earl, which passed the Northeast far offshore. Strickland said wind speeds in Southwest Harbor at the time of the rescue were between 7 and 10 mph and wave heights were around 3 to 5 feet.
“They were on the scene pretty quickly,” Strickland said of the responding Coast Guard crew.
The woman was transported to Bar Harbor where she was checked by emergency medical technicians, he said. The woman was uninjured in the incident.
Strickland said it was not clear if the weather conditions contributed to the woman falling in the water.
The National Weather Service office in Caribou on Friday posted a message on Twitter advising people to stay “a safe distance from the crashing waves.”
Thunder Hole is a popular spot for park visitors, especially when rough weather kicks up the surf, causing big waves to splash dramatically along the bedrock outcroppings along Ocean Drive. The site is known to draw a lot of people in late summer when tourism peaks and occasional tropical storms blow north along the East Coast.
In 2009, an unusually large wave generated by Hurricane Bill, which also passed far out to sea, drenched visitors gathered on the shore near Thunder Hole and dragged several people into the water. Some were injured when the wave crashed into them and one person, a 7 year-old girl from New York, was dragged into the ocean and drowned.
