R E A L-L I F E R E S C U E
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EAL STEPHENSON STOOD on the beach at Nature’s Valley and looked anxiously out to sea. The waves were monstrous and he could already see a couple of upturned surfskis with heads bobbing next to them in the water. He dialled the emergency number of the Plettenberg Bay NSRI station. ‘Neal is one of our team, a senior coxswain,’ said Marc Rodgers, Plett NSRI station commander. ‘So when he called, I knew there was real trouble!’ Neal was one of a dozen surfski paddlers who had set out late on the morning of 15 December 2019 to do a route from Plettenberg Bay to Nature’s Valley, a distance of some 18km. The wind was blowing an ideal 20-30 knots southwest.
‘It’s a very good paddle,’ says Carl Behrens, also a member of the group. ‘But conditions aren’t often conducive. The surf is usually too big at Nature’s, so we don’t go if there’s any swell. ‘We were all safetied up; we were all using PFDs and leashes, and we were running the SafeTrx tracking app,’ Carl says. Chris Parnell is a lifeguard who was on duty at Nature’s Valley that day. ‘The guys had called me in the morning to ask about the surf,’ he says. ‘At that point, the sea was flat. But at lunch time the wind suddenly increased and the swell built rapidly.’ The tide had receded too and the surf started to pound. Breakers started to form on a reef offshore. Now there were two obstacles. As Neal had paddled in at Nature’s Valley, the surf was much bigger than he’d expected but he had managed to
THE SEA is always IN CHARGE
Plettenberg Bay crew rallied to assist surfskiers at Nature’s Valley after a day out on the water turned into a nightmare. By Robin Mousley
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SEA RESCUE AUTUMN 2020
