Swimmer

In the action

On Saturday we had a swimmer. I wasn't on the scene having paddled ahead a bit but I have the details from a debriefing of the incident.

The paddler went over when hit by a steep wave that rose out of nowhere. Two unsuccessful roll attempts and he bailed. One of the guys tried to dump the water out of the boat but wasn't sufficiently perpendicular to lift it out onto his deck. Then there was an attempt to tow the boat out of the soup zone but there was a problem clipping on and when the overturned boat was taken into tow, it was difficult to move upside-down. The swimmer was in the water about 10 minutes but didn't feel concerned.

Any incident like this is an opportunity to learn what went wrong and make adjustments for the next time this happens. A better option may have been to get the swimmer back in the boat without dumping out the water and have him paddle the boat out of the soup into calmer water to pump it out. That takes less time and gets everyone out of the danger zone quicker.

The good thing was that no one was hurt.