Ron Moyen was just stopping to stretch his legs and have a bite to eat while on the way to Faro Tuesday evening when he saw a splash in the water of Little Salmon Lake.

He didn't think much of the splash at first, he said in an interview today.

It wasn't until about eight minutes later when he started to hear some shouting that he realized something might be wrong.

'I stood up on the picnic table and I saw his head bobbing around,' said Moyen.

The splash turned out to be that of a canoe shooting up and capsizing after a 50-something Whitehorse man stood up in his boat and fell over.

Moyen said he tried yelling out to the capsized canoeist that he would go and get help. However, the other man's shouting was drowning him out, so he just jumped into his truck and honked the horn a couple of times and took off down the road.

A territorial campground was about three minutes away. Moyen said he found three people working there who he quickly explained the situation to.

John Bowness volunteered to call the RCMP and ambulance and Lou Drake volunteered a boat.

The group gathered up some blankets and a first aid kit and headed back to the lake, said Moyen.

When they got back to the water, the capsized canoeist wasn't yelling out as often, he said, and they were facing another problem with the boat they'd brought.

The craft was a speedboat, he said, but it was still winterized and they couldn't get the motor going.

'It didn't look good at the start,' he said.

Moyen and Drake tried playing around with the boat's motor for a bit, he said, but he thought the man had likely been in the water for almost an hour at that point.

He told Drake that they had better get in and start paddling, he said.

The canoe had capsized about a kilometre from the shore. Moyen said it likely took them almost 25 minutes to paddle the awkward boat out to the man.

When they finally managed to get to the man, he was standing on the small piece of the boat that was not submerged, but he was clearly suffering from severe hypothermia, Moyen said.

'He wasn't even looking at us. He was really out of it.'

Moyen said they even had to tell the man to let go of the canoe and let them help him get into the speedboat.

By that time, the wind was picking up and it proved to be a little difficult helping the man get into the boat, said Moyen.

Once the man was able to step over the dismantled motor and get inside, Drake and Moyen helped him undress and wrapped him in the blankets.

The two managed to paddle the boat about half way back before the RCMP arrived in their rescue Zodiac and were able to tow the boat the rest of the way to shore.

'Everyone really pulled together,' said Moyen, an electrician with the territorial aviation branch.

'The guy would have died if they had not done that,' Cpl. Ken Alderson said in an interview Wednesday.

The rescued man was taken to the Faro nursing station, where he was treated for hypothermia.

Moyen said he visited the man about four hours after the rescue. He was doing better and was able to talk again.

The man has recovered from the hypothermia and has been released from the nursing station, said Alderson.

The RCMP would not release the man's name.

He was in the wrong kind of boat for the weather on the lake and he just wasn't thinking when he stood up, said Alderson, adding the canoeist is feeling rather embarrassed right now.

Moyen said the man wasn't wearing a life jacket.

There's a lesson to the story, he said, 'Wear a life jacket.'

Moyen has never taken part in a rescue before, but he said he is an experience boater and he does have an understanding of how to deal with an individual suffering from hypothermia.