When Winthrop emergency crews were called for an ice rescue on Upper Narrows Pond on Thursday, they needed only seconds to respond.

Apparently, a dog had gone out onto the ice, and a man tried to rescue it using a canoe. But he fell out of the boat and into the water, leaving him clinging to a sheet of ice.

Dan Brooks, Winthrop’s fire chief, said that was within two minutes. Deputy Chief Kale Malmsten was already on the road, his personal rescue rope in tow.

With near-frozen hands, the mostly submerged man tied the rope around his arms. Malmsten and a nearby Winthrop firefighter pulled the dog and middle-aged man—whose name Brooks declined to provide—safely from the water after about 10 minutes.

This was a situation Winthrop firefighters train for, Brooks said. In fact, the department had just held an in-house ice rescue training session in mid-March. Last year, six Winthrop firefighters became qualified ice rescue technicians.

In his 36 years with the Winthrop Fire Department, Brooks couldn’t recall rescuing anyone who’d fallen through ice. Crews regularly save animals in such situations, he said, but rarely humans.

“It’s kind of the world of firefighting,” Brooks said. “We train all the time for lots of things, and most of the time, fortunately, you don’t have to do it. It was a pretty dramatic moment for him.”

Early-spring ice can be deceiving, said Mark Latti, the communications director for the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. But once water bodies are mostly thawed, Latti said extreme caution should be used when going out onto ice.

“It can be maybe fine somewhere on a lake, but it could be horrible on that same lake, even 20 feet away,” Latti said. “Particularly, if the ice looks gray, stay off it.”

Even in emergency situations, precautions should be taken, he said. Chief among them: having a rescue partner and wearing a life jacket. The man who canoed solo Thursday afternoon onto Upper Narrows Pond was not wearing one.

He was taken to MaineGeneral in Augusta, where Brooks said he was treated and released. The dog, too, was fine.