PORT TOWNSEND – Kendon Paegelow was awakened at 5 a.m. Wednesday by good news, he said.
On the other end of the telephone was his friend, Ralph Jenkins, phoning from Tennessee, to ask why Paegelow had reported him missing on Oct. 8 and why Port Townsend police were searching for him.
Jenkins has a distinctive voice, the rugged inflection of a seasoned welder, Paegelow said, so he recognized him, but he asked few questions because he was caught off guard.
“He called me at five this morning, and I’m not coherent at five,” Paegelow said on Wednesday.
Jenkins, 58, told his friend of 30 years that he was safe and sound in Tennessee, visiting family.
He had read an Internet news story saying the Port Townsend police were searching for him, believing he was missing or perhaps drowned.
Later Wednesday, Paegelow contacted Port Townsend police to report the good news and to call off the search.
“We got lucky,” said Port Townsend Police Sgt. Ed Green.
He said that’s not always the case with missing person cases.
More than two weeks before, on Oct. 1, Jenkins had showed up at Paegelow’s sailboat moored at the long Linear Dock in the Port of Port Townsend Boat Haven, and asked to stay the night on the boat.
Paegelow agreed.
When he got up in the morning, Paegelow was surprised at what he saw, or rather, what he didn’t see.
“He just wasn’t here that morning,” Paegelow said.
Although he was concerned, Paegelow didn’t report Jenkins missing until a week later, after some members of Jenkins’ family had requested that he do so.
Port Townsend police gathered a team of seven scuba divers to search the waters around Paegelow’s boat, believing perhaps that Jenkins had fallen overboard.
For three hours they dove the depths of the waters in the vicinity of the dock where the boat was moored, but came up with nothing.
Police also checked with area jails and hospitals to see if Jenkins was at any of those locations. He wasn’t.
“I was pretty well convinced he was dead,” Paegelow said.
By Wednesday evening, Paegelow had not talked with Jenkins again, although he planned to speak with him sometime that evening to get more details on why he left without letting him know.
When asked if he wished Jenkins had left a note or told him he was leaving, Paegelow said, “an immense amount, then I would have just ignored it.”
But now that he knows his friend is not missing or in harm’s way, he is relieved.
“He’s safe. He’s alive. There are no problems,” Paegelow said.
