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| Dennis Robertson |
Mike Wolff and five of his Brown hockey teammates hadn’t been swimming, surfing and boogie boarding for long in the choppy waves at South Shore Beach in Little Compton on Tuesday afternoon when they heard a girl screaming.
“I looked over to my right and this girl was yelling towards us, ‘Help! Help!’ ” Wolff said. “She was kind of bobbing up and down. Her friend was a little further out, maybe five or ten yards.”
Just over 30 yards from shore, the two girls, approximately 12 and 14 years old, were caught in a rip current in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Irene.
Wolff and teammate Jeff Ryan swam quickly to the girls and, battling the rip current, got them to shore.
“It was a hard swim to move even five yards,” against the rip current, which was pushing him away from shore, Wolff said.
Once they made it back to the beach, the girls “were in a panic,” said Wolff.
“ ‘Can you help my boyfriend? My boyfriend is hurt,’ ” one of the girls said. “(Jeff) Ryan and I were like, ‘Where is your boyfriend?’
“He was floating on his back, past where the waves were breaking. He was going under the waves, kind of getting tossed around,” said Wolff.
“When I first spotted the kid, I thought it was a dead body floating,” he said.
Seeing what was going on, the other four Brown players –– Dennis Robertson, Mike Borge, Bobby Farnham and David Brownschidle –– leaped into action. Robertson, who has worked as a lifeguard at a swimming pool in his native British Columbia, took charge, swimming to the boy, who was about 60 yards from shore. With help from Borge, Robertson got him onto a surfboard and headed toward the beach.
It was only after minutes of struggling toward shore and making little headway that the players realized that the way out of a rip current is to swim parallel to the beach until reaching calmer water, said Brownschidle.
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