Neither Tom nor Nick Murphy had a good feeling about the outcome of the search and rescue of a missing dog they undertook the morning of July 4 in the Budd Drive lagoon of Beach Haven West. That didn’t stop the tween cousins from setting out, by inflatable boat, to help.

FRIENDS FOR LIFE: (left to right) Tom Murphy and his cousin, Nick, flank Charlie, the German shepherd they are credited with rescuing and saving, with a little help from Tom’s dad, on July 4.

“I was nervous I was going to find the dog dead,” Tom Murphy, 11, said of Charlie, the one-year-old German shepherd who was last seen on his owners’ backyard Ring camera trying to get onto their boat about midnight July 3.

“I didn’t think we’d find it (the dog) alive, or at all,” his cousin, Nick Murphy, 12, added.