Mother, son pulled out to sea by strong current on P.E.I.’s north shore

“When I saw the terror in his face I thought, ‘OK, we’ve got a really bad situation here.’ It just hit me, we were in trouble because we’re really far offshore and he needs help and I can’t help him.”

Johnston, who grew up spending half the year on the north shore, said she kept reaching out to her son telling him to hold her hand as they drifted further out to sea, but she had little strength left to push him closer to the beach.

“You’d swim as hard as you could to get ahead of the wave and then the wave would crash on top of you and suck you back, so you were back further than when you started,” she said. “It felt like swimming on a treadmill.”

As she fought, she was calculating how long it would take a boat from a nearby harbour to reach them. The timing didn’t look good, she said, as it would be difficult to find the pair in the dark with no one on shore able to hear or see them.

Johnston said she wanted to tell her story to warn people about the risk of rip currents and urge them to learn what to do if caught in one. She said she did exactly the opposite of what is advised by trying to swim right into shore. She said there was little discernible sign of the trouble in the water at the time, but has since learned that an electrical storm the night before had created ideal conditions for rip currents.

Environment Canada recommends that a swimmer carried seaward by a rip current “should not struggle against it, but swim across it, parallel to the beach. Once out of the narrow rip current, the waves will tend to carry the swimmer shoreward.”

She estimated they were about 30 metres from shore before they started making progress against the forceful current, which claimed the life of a 52-year-old New Brunswick man hours earlier after he got caught in the powerful tide and waves in the same area.

Johnston, who swims regularly on that stretch of shore, said her son made it back to the beach first after about 20 minutes in the water, but it took her another 10 minutes to do the same.

Charlie said when he finally got onto the beach, expecting to see his mother beside him, he was terrified when he found himself alone.

“I rolled over and I was going to talk to my mom and I realized she was still out as far as when we started, and I was like, ‘No, no, no, no,’” he said.

“I was going to get my phone and call 911, but my phone was way down the beach and I didn’t want to lose an eye on her.”

Charlie said the pounding of the waves and pushing of the water was exhausting.

“It was like when you got sucked underwater, you’d come up for a big breath and then you’d get crushed by a wave and you’d get a mouth full of salt water,” he said. “It was a kind of traumatizing experience.”

– By Alison Auld in Halifax

The Canadian Press

by Canadian Press

Mother, son pulled out to sea by strong current on P.E.I.’s north shore

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