COEUR d'ALENE - Like clockwork is the tradition, except this year they saved lives.

A three-day weekend on the Clark Fork River turned into a rescue operation Saturday evening for local nurses Carol Eachon and Dawn Krakenberg, who had to break up their holiday briefly to save four people from drowning.

"We've been doing it for eight years, around five or six of us have always been going, but it's pretty open for whoever wants to go," said Eachon, a nurse for 24 years at Kootenai Medical Center, on her annual summer rafting trip to the Clark Fork River near St. Regis, Mont.

One of those steady six is Krakenberg, an old colleague of Eachon's, now nursing at North Idaho Advanced Care Hospital in Post Falls.

"Tell the boss I did good," Krakenberg said. "Tell her I did really good."

Both of them did, actually.

Around 7:30 p.m. Saturday the two, along with 10 friends, were getting off the river after a full day of rafting. They were loading up the rafts and waiting for their car rides when they noticed a drift boat loaded with four people crash into a bridge piling. The boat tipped and pinned against the piling, and the four occupants, each without a lifejacket, clung to the upside down boat.

"The young lady was screaming, she couldn't find her mom," Eachon said.

All nurses have life-saving experiences, but Eachon and Krakenberg can row, too. Or as Eachon put it: "Dawn's really good with an oar, and so am I."

The two grabbed the raft and ran it up river far enough to set out on the best course to the wreck. The woman who was underwater had emerged, but the foursome, described as a 20-something younger couple and a middle-aged older couple, were barely hanging on.

"We paddled our asses off getting to the boat and we hit it dead center," Eachon said. "Someone was helping us, that's for sure."

The older woman who had been submerged and had taken on so much water had blue skin and her lips were trembling.

The two managed to put life jackets on the four, and had them hold the rope around the raft before they paddled away. With so much weight on the raft now, and the water moving swiftly, steering became impossible. The raft couldn't turn toward shore, so the remaining 10 friends formed a human bridge by holding hands to the middle of the river to catch it.

"What they did is save those people's lives," said Suellen Cantrell, owner of the cabin where the nurses were staying. "They didn't have a lifejacket on. Nobody gets around those pillars."

The younger couple was believed to be from Post Falls, but couldn't be located by press time. After they reached shore they expressed their gratitude: They were cold and in shock, but otherwise OK, the nurses said.

"Then they left and we left," Eachon said. "We didn't even get their names."

Locals retrieved the boat the next day.

And the trip, per tradition, continued.