Making a splash for pancreatic cancer research. Baldwin resident Patrick Dolan survives annual bone-chilling ‘Polar Plunge’ fundraiser at the end of winter. Why did he do it?

The fact that swimming weather was many weeks off didn’t stop Patrick Dolan from plunging into Baldwin Harbor for a good cause last month.

Dolan, who has lived in Baldwin for six years, endured 40-degree water and similar temperatures on March 11. Each March for the past five years, Dolan, 37, the director of channel partnerships at the tech company Pixis.ai, has hosted, and taken part in, what he calls a “Polar Plunge” to raise money for different causes. This year he raised $3,700 in honor of his father-in-law, who died of pancreatic cancer last April.

The bone-chilling tradition started in 2018. “My brother did polar plunges all the time,” Dolan said. “As he suffers from drug addiction, I asked myself, how can I find a way to be connected with my brother?”

Dolan has lost a cousin to drug addiction, and wanted to support his older brother in any way he could so his brother wouldn’t head down the same path. So, for his first plunge, Dolan raised money for a nonprofit called Shatterproof, headquartered in Norwalk, Connecticut, which focuses on drug addiction and the impact it has on addicts’ families.

Dolan utilized social media to raise awareness of the swim and money for Shatterproof. “Facebook had these tools to make it really easy to raise money,” he said. “So that’s where this started, and then it obviously kind of grew from there. His brother, he noted, is doing well, and Patrick said he was “incredibly proud of him.”

“Every year, the plunge would be in honor of somebody,” he continued, “and I tried to attach myself to a charity that’s relatively unknown, that I feel like that person would be proud to support.”

This year the cause was personal once again, as Dolan raised money for the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, or PanCAN — a charity that funds research into the nearly always fatal form of the disease — in honor of his father-in-law. “He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2019, during Thanksgiving,” Dolan recalled.

He described his husband, Carlos Dolan’s, father, Jose Maisonet, of New Haven, Connecticut, as a “great, fun and energetic” man. After undergoing a procedure that sent the cancer into remission, Maisonet began feeing its effects again about a year after his initial diagnosis. “It was relatively quick from the time we realized the pancreatic cancer came back to when he ultimately passed,” Dolan said.

He decided to raise money for PanCAN after discussions with his husband his and mother-in-law, Nancy Maisonet. He asked them, “What’s something that Jose would be proud of?” and they suggested the American Cancer Society, but Dolan wanted to promote a less well-known organization, so the family ultimately decided on PanCAN.

“They have resources for pancreatic cancer patients, and they have resources for their families,” Dolan said of the organization, whose mission is to raise the five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer from its sobering current rate of just 5 to 10 percent. “PanCAN isn’t just this entity that’s looking to cure cancer, as a lot of places are,” Dolan explained. “It extends beyond to both patients and family.”

For this year’s Polar Plunge, Dolan’s goal was to raise at least $1,000 — and he ended up nearly quadrupling it. “In total, we’ve raised over $25,000 over the five years that I’ve done this,” he said.

Asked how cold, on a scale of 1 to 10, the water in Baldwin Harbor was seven weeks ago, Dolan didn’t hesitate in answering, “Ten.” “This year it took me a solid few minutes to finally get to that point where I jumped in the water,” he recounted. “And every year, it’s just as cold and jarring.”

Despite that, he says the effort gives him an “adrenaline rush” and “exhilaration,” and he wants to continue doing the fundraisers. But early last month, about a week before the plunge, Dolan an-nounced that he and Carlos were planning to move New Hampshire. Dolan said he wanted to be close to the many members of his family who live there.

Although he is moving away from Baldwin, he hopes to continue the Polar Plunge tradition. “I’m genuinely hoping that for future iterations of this, I can get other people to do it,” he said, “because it’s something pretty much anyone can do.”