Stonington — James Quinn was boating back from dinner at Watch Hill about 8 p.m. on Friday when he saw another boat sitting still in the water near the mouth of the Pawcatuck River by Seal Rocks.

At first, he thought it was simply anchored. Then Quinn, who was with his partner and another couple, saw boaters from another vessel pointing to the motionless boat they’d passed.

Quinn and the others with him looked back. They saw five or six adults waving for help.

“They were taking on water, they had hit a rock,” Quinn said.

Ben Yanni, the operations director of New England Science and Sailing, an educational nonprofit in Stonington, was on the boat with Quinn. Yanni, who was with his fiancée, teaches coastal navigation and power boating, and has been a commercial captain for the last ten years.

“Ben knows everything about boats and water safety, so he started yelling to them, ‘Are you OK? Is anybody injured?'” Quinn said.

The boaters said they were all right, at first. But four people were injured. They’d also lost power, it was getting dark and the glass hatch on the bow was shattered.

“They were really scared. They seemed to be really scared,” Quinn said. “They were hurt and I think that they were a little discombobulated and I think in a little bit of shock.”

Yanni created a bow to connect the two boats and tossed it to them. They attached it to a cleat on their bow, and Quinn radioed for help to the Watch Hill Fire Department and the Stonington Police Department. The Pawcatuck and Wequetequock fire departments and crews from both the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management and Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection also responded.

Yanni stepped aboard the disabled boat to make sure everyone was all right and the vessel wasn’t about to sink immediately.

One boater had a dislocated shoulder. “There was some blood on the boat as well, just probably from impact and somebody hitting a face on the windshield,” Yanni said.

But Yanni saw he had time. His captain’s license and training courses allowed him to put the boat in tow and make sure it wouldn’t sink on the spot, he said.

“We could see that they were taking on water,” Quinn said. “The bow was dropping we had concerns about that.”

As they towed the 22-foot powerboat, help arrived from Stonington police and Watch Hill Fire Department.

The injured moved onto the police boat while two others stayed on the boat under tow. Quinn then followed the police and fire boats, towing the damaged boat to Barn Island.

Watch Hill emergency medical technicians treated the injured while they were en route. The victim with the injured shoulder was then transported to Westerly Hospital for treatment.

The area in Little Narragansett Bay has quite a few rocks and hazards, and Yanni said the boaters probably weren’t familiar with the local waters or didn't use a chart. Seal Rocks is well depicted, he said.

The boat involved in the accident had traveled outside a channel marked with bouys to designate a safe route.

“I recommend to all boaters to be familiar with the water they’re boating in and have a chart plotter,” Yanni said. “It’s like a Garmin for a boat, that tells you where the deep water is and the rocks are. Working with a lot of people in the water, safety is extremely important, and it’s critical that you have knowledge of where the rocks are and what a channel marker means. It tells you where you should and should not go.”

Quinn said the boaters were lucky.

“Fortunately, Ben is a very experienced mariner,” Quinn said. "They were very fortunate that Ben was on our boat and we were the ones that ran across them, otherwise it might have ended a little differently.”

d.straszheim@theday.com