It started out like any other trip on the Charles River for Anton Prodan, who travels up and down the waterway in a motorboat while working as a rowing coach at Boston’s Community Rowing, Inc. boathouse.
But as Prodan and his student, an older woman, rounded the bend at Magazine Beach, the journey took an abrupt and violent turn.
They heard the first few pop-pops of gunfire coming from the direction of Memorial Drive, then dozens more. To their horror, they realized they were moving closer and closer to what had begun to look like a battlefield, with a gunman walking up an abandoned street and exchanging gunfire with police.
“It was like a small war,” said Prodan. “I was very scared.”
Neither of the boaters were hurt in the violence, during which two people were shot and badly injured, and a wounded gunman was taken into custody. He was arraigned Thursday.
Prodan has some familiarity with war zones. He and his family fled Ukraine after war erupted there in 2022. His wife and daughter once spent weeks underground, hiding from Russian soldiers.
In the river straddling Cambridge and Boston, a world away from the war in Ukraine, he and his student — who could not be reached for this story — were suddenly civilians caught in crossfire, and extraordinarily vulnerable.
While dozens of drivers fled their cars and scrambled to find cover from a barrage unleashed seemingly at random, the two boaters were fully exposed and had nowhere to go.
Prodan estimated that at one point he and his student were just “ten to 15 feet” from the suspect as he exchanged gunfire with police.
They stayed in their boats — Prodan in a flat, motorized one called a coaching launch, his student in a scull — and tried to put some distance between themselves and the shooter.
He said he was terrified that a stray bullet might hit him or his student.
“I said, ‘listen there is a gun and police are shooting on one side and the other side.’ I said, ‘Let’s go to the other side of the river. This is a very dangerous situation.’”
Prodan, a renowned Olympic rowing coach who had decades of experience with the sport in Ukraine, came to Boston after a journey with his family to seek refuge in the Czech Republic and then Canada. Leadership at Community Rowing, Inc., a public boathouse on the riverbank in Brighton, recruited Prodan to join its coaching staff in 2023.
His son stayed behind in Ukraine; his daughter, 16-year-old Mariia Prodan, is a champion rower who trains with her father.
He said he had hoped that settling in the US would shield his family from the violence that ripped through their home country.
“Before, I thought Boston is the safest place,” he said. “Now, I’m a little bit scared.”
By the time Prodan and his student made it back to the boathouse, bystanders’ videos of the shooting had begun circulating online, at least one of which showed the boaters’ proximity to the gunman.
Some who saw them in clips wondered why the boaters hadn’t leapt into the water to avoid gunshots. But Ted Benford, the executive director of Community Rowing, Inc., said Prodan and the student rower did exactly what rowers are told to do in situations like those.
“You want to keep people in their vessels,” Benford said. “If they are injured, it’s a lot easier to recover and treat them if they haven’t been in the water. Having people seek the safest place they can while in the boat is really the best method to avert further disaster.”
Benford said rowers do, occasionally, come close to dangers along the riverbank. So they plan around worst-case scenarios that can come up in a waterway that snakes through a busy urban area, including shootings.
For now, Prodan has gotten back to his routine on the Charles. In the shooting’s wake, he has continued coaching, spending 6 to 8 hours a day on the water with his students, passing by that same spot over and over on his motorized boat.
“Every time I see that place, I remember Monday,” he said.
Spencer Buell can be reached at spencer.buell@globe.com. Follow him @SpencerBuell.