A 39-year-old Longview man was presumed drowned Saturday morning after swimming into the Columbia River to retrieve his boat, which was drifting away from the shore on Fisher Island off Willow Grove.

Ronald Dean Ringbom of Longview and his 15-year-old son, Jake, took a small aluminum boat to the island early Saturday to hunt goose, said Capt. Mark Nelson of the Cowlitz County Sheriff’s Office. When the boat somehow got away from the shore, Ringbom stripped to his boxers and went in after it. He went under and never resurfaced.

Jake Ringbom went into the water after his father but couldn’t find him, Nelson said. The boy called 911 around 7 a.m.

It was the eighth drowning in Cowlitz County. Three people have drowned in the Columbia, two died in the Cowlitz River, two children drowned in backyard swimming pools and a Vancouver woman died Aug. 23 after going under in Yale Lake the previous day.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Nelson recalled thinking to himself when he learned of the incident Saturday morning.

“It’s just been such an incredibly tragic summer for us with drowning,” he said. “I’m sick. I’m heartbroken for these people.”

Dive teams from Cowlitz County searched the area off Fisher’s Island throughout the day but hadn’t found Ringbom’s body as of Saturday afternoon. Woodland Fire Department assisted with a sonar device. The Coast Guard provided a boat and helicopter, Nelson said.

Ringbom’s wife and children stood near the river’s edge at the Willow Grove boat launch Saturday morning as the sheriff’s office deployed boats and divers. Other friends and family members were nearby.

Norm Dick, a Longview attorney and friend of the Ringbom family, said Ringbom was an experienced outdoorsman who had worked on tug boats and knew the river well.

“If he could drown this easily, it could happen to anyone just as quickly,” Dick said. “He’d be the last person that you’d think that this would happen to. It’s sort of a lesson for us all.”

The circumstances were so “benign,” so commonplace, he said, it seemed more like a freak accident than a case of bad judgment.

Dick, who didn’t witness the incident but spoke about it with Jake Ringbom, said the boat wasn’t far from the shore when Ringbom went after it. He waded much of the way, Dick said, but the riverbed must have dropped out.

“It sounds like something that you or I or anyone would have done,” he said. “The boat was so close. … I don’t think he did anything wrong.”

The current seems to have grabbed the boat, which contained Ringbom’s and his son’s life jackets. Ringbom was fit and a strong swimmer, but once he reached the boat, he had trouble getting a hold of it and climbing in, Dick said.

Ringbom had surgery to install pins in his legs after they were crushed years ago in a tug boat accident, Dick said. That, he suggested, may have made him particularly susceptible to the cold water.

Jake “dove down a time or two to try to catch his dad,” Dick said. “But it was too murky. He couldn’t see anything.”

Ringbom grew up in Longview and was an administrator for PT Northwest, a physical therapy clinic on Third Avenue, Dick said. He was a “man’s man” and avid fisherman and hunter. He was also active in Emmanuel Lutheran Church and loved spending time with his wife, Janet, and three children, Mason, Mallory and Jake.

“Ron was just the best dad. You almost can’t imagine,” Dick said. “A good man, about as good as they come.”

PT Northwest’s Web site said Ringbom earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Washington State University in 2006. He began working at the clinic the same year.

Nelson said the county needs to start an aggressive water safety program to educate the public about the area’s rivers.

“People don’t understand that in the Columbia — any of the rivers around here — they’re all glacier-fed,” Nelson said. “People just don’t realize what’s going to happen when they dive in the water. The cold starts shutting things down in a big hurry. The Columbia is notorious for that.”

“To go swimming in the river, it sucks the life out of people.”