I pity any person who’s not been to chesil beach before . A few steps into the lovely water and any further , whoosh , you’re gone . Literally falling off the edge !
The main danger from the beaches where I live are rip currents. People get caught up in them and don’t know how to get out (you swim/paddle across them into calm water and then swim towards the beach) But people panic because they are getting sucked out into deep water, so they use up all of their oxygen, start flapping and eventually drown.
I’m no expert , but I have been told Don’t go into the sea off Chesil beech . 1 - it just suddenly falls away under your feet . 2- the tides will take you out before you know it . Don’t mess with Mother Nature ! We live in Dorset and often go to Portland and walk on Chesil beech , walked into the water once , never again !!! Stunning part of the world though IMHO .
Must admit I was shocked at the difference in tides etc. down there when I went last Summer compared to the beaches closer to home. From an elevated position you can literally see where all the stronger currents are and why the flag system is so important.
Yep, it's why lifeguard cover is so important. I get it that it's been sprung on the RNLI and providing PPE etc is a problem. But weighing up the risks of infection v drowning, I'm with the lifeguards who are begging the RNLI to put them on duty. So many people down here at the moment and most of them don't have a clue about the conditions in the sea. I've been down there today helping out and one woman I spoke to was waist deep in the water watching her young son getting dragged out on his bodyboard in a rip. She wasn't even aware of what was happening. All it needed was me telling the lad to hang on to my leash whilst I towed him 20 yards back into the shallows, but without wanting to sound cocky, if I hadn't been there and spotted that, that young lad could have been another casualty today.
Remember being caught by the undertow at Fistral in Newquay once as a teenager... me and my cousin both ... we were starting to panic then some old dude nearby on his board shouted "steady lads, just lift your feet up and paddle with the board" ... still sticks with me, without that old head around we would have been in all sorts of trouble, the power of the thing was incredible ...
IMO a very dangerous position to put yourself in. If it goes tits up you could find yourself in the dock. Jumping in and saving someone’s life on the spur of the moment is greatly different from “setting yourselves up” as a volunteer safety group.
It's a risk I'm willing to take. And we've not really set ourselves up as any sort of organised voluntary group. It's just a group of surfers, some of whom are lifeguards, keeping an eye out and going over to assist where necessary. I'm not over dramatising when I say that there could have been 3-4 drownings at my beach yesterday, all from people getting swept out by rip currents. We don't have any lifeguard cover from Oct -Apr anyway and winter is when it gets big, so it's something we used to doing instinctively anyway.
Those sort of people mate, if they don’t drown today they’ll be eaten by a hippo tomorrow, or fall from a bridge the next day. No amount of protection can protect the thick.