Daria Doering

7/7/14

Yesterday I got up and it was sweltering. So I decided to go to the beach and jump in the ocean. I haven’t done that yet this summer, and thought perhaps I could get a parking spot if I went early enough.

So I took off for Ocean Beach at 7:45 am. The parking lot was half empty, which was awesome! As I walked toward the ocean I looked to see if there were flags to indicate the swim zone, but did not see any. I also looked for lifeguards and did not see any of them either. There were many surfers in the ocean all along the shore. So I went in the ocean, which felt pretty cold … as far as I could without getting my hair wet. Then I came out and started walking to my car. But as I reached the sea wall I decided I felt incomplete – I would need to shower anyway, why not get my hair wet?

So I headed back into the ocean. This time it was easy to adjust to the water temperature. As I went out, I felt the ocean pulling at me, strongly – out to sea! Could this be a rip tide? As I felt myself being pulled, I realized my feet could not touch the ocean floor any longer. This was not my plan! Time to get back to shore immediately. But I could still feel the tide pulling, pulling – what incredible power!

I decided – This is the day I become a body surfer! Maybe this was why this happened! I tried to catch every wave going in and let it carry me. I didn’t feel I was making much progress at all, but finally I could feel the ocean floor again. I dug in with my toes and tried to resist that relentlessly current snatching me out to sea.

Finally I was walking in to the shore – still fighting the current – and saw a lifeguard in a jeep on the beach. I was planning to say to her – That was scary! There is a powerful rip tide out there!

But she beat me to it! “If you want to keep swimming, you want to go beyond these jetties, because there’s a powerful rip tide out there today,” she said. “It will pull you all the way out there.”

“No kidding,” I replied. “That was scary!”

“I was coming to get you,” she said. That was a relief. I knew when I was out in the ocean that I would not die, because there were so many surfers. And I knew that to get out of a rip tide, you swim parallel to the shore until you get beyond it. But that would be a lot of swimming. I knew that if I called for help, hopefully one of the surfers would get me in to shore. But the embarrassment of a rescue operation was definitely not something I wanted. So I was grateful to learn that there was a lifeguard, and even more grateful that I had not needed one!