Rehoboth lifeguard stand found off North Carolina’s Outer Banks

A Rehoboth Beach lifeguard stand reportedly was found Sunday more than 250 miles from home, off the coast of North Carolina.

It is believed to be the last of a group of seven found missing one morning in early July.

News of Sunday’s discovery first was reported on Delaware-surf-fishing.com, just hours after the big find.

Oddly enough, it was a fellow from Upland, Pennsylvania – best known to Delawareans as the home of the Crozer Burn Center – who found the stand.

Matt Doyle, a machine operator who turned 32 on Sunday, told The News Journal that he goes to the Outer Banks every year but never made such a discovery before.

“I just drove 350 miles to get here from Pennsylvania yesterday,” he said, adding that he plans to stay a week.

About noon on Sunday, Doyle said, he was setting out lines to do some low-tide fishing when he saw the lifeguard stand.

“It was just 10 to 15 feet out, rolling around on its side,” he said.

He figured it must have come from a nearby beach.

Then he saw the Rehoboth Beach sign on the back.

“We were all shocked,” he said.

Doyle said he and a few other people dragged it up to where it wouldn’t be washed out again by high tide.

A few hours later when he returned to the stand, however, “someone had taken the Rehoboth Beach sign off it.”

He posted a photo of the lifeguard stand on his Facebook page, in turn spotted by Rich King of Millsboro, who runs the DSF Delaware Surf Fishing website full-time.

Neither he nor The News Journal could determine Sunday night whether anyone would be heading south to fetch the recovered stand.

All of the stands – each weighing more than 500 pounds and worth a total of $5,600 – “were floated out to sea,” where they posed a serious marine hazard for watercraft, Rehoboth Beach Patrol Capt. Kent Buckson told The News Journal after the first few were recovered.

At last check, Lt. William L. Sullivan of the Rehoboth Beach Police Department said the felony theft remained under active investigation, with tips directed to Detective Tyler Whitman at (302) 227-2577.

No arrests have been announced.

Right after the stands went missing, the Ocean City (Maryland) Beach Patrol offered to lend some chairs, but Buckson said there were exactly seven back-up stands in stored in the city’s public works yard that were pressed into service.

Almost immediately, he said shortly after the theft, fishermen started calling to report sightings of the stands out in the Atlantic Ocean.

Gradually, missing stands were collected with help from area fishers, Delaware and Maryland state police aviation units, crews from the U.S. Coast Guard at Indian River and Ocean City, Maryland, along with Delaware’s Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control.

Nature also pitched in, with one of the missing stands floating up on a private beach in the Cotton Patch community.

Contact robin brown at (302) 324-2856 or rbrown@delawareonline.com. Find her on Facebook and follow her on Twitter @rbrowndelaware.