Class Interrupted

I was taking a surf rescue class in the SF Bay Area and much of the class took place by the Golden Gate Bridge which made for a beautiful place to train. It also lent itself to a unique real world training opportunity.

It was the morning session of the third day of class and I was in the group doing small boat ops pretty near the base of the North Tower of the bridge. The other group was doing some rescue swimming in the cove closer to shore. I was piloting one of the boats and doing some victim retrieval drills when I heard a loud whistle and saw the other instructor (who was running the swim ops) standing on the pier and raising his fist in the air, the signal for "come to me". Our instructor headed over that way in his boat and I decided to follow along behind to see what was up. As I got closer I could only hear a bit of their conversation but what I caught was something about the South Tower, in the water, and a lot of pointing. I knew immediately what must have happened and as the instructor turned his boat around, I came along side and confirmed it. Someone had just jumped from the bridge near the South Tower and we were en-route to start the search.

We called the other boat to us and the three boats went flying out towards the bridge as fast as we could go. The first thing we saw was smoke on the water (yet no fire in the sky). I learned later that when someone jumps, the CHP or bridge personnel will go out to the person's last known location and drop a flare to mark the position and give us an idea of the tides. In this case the tide was still going out and so the flare was moving out to sea.

Just as our three boats coordinated what our search pattern would be (starting close to the bridge and working our way out to sea) a PD boat and CG boat came racing out of the harbor and further out past the flare. They began their search pattern from the outside working back in toward our boats. After less than probably five minutes of searching we saw the CG and PD boats take off, racing back to the harbor. Shortly after that we got the news over the radio that they had recovered the body and were heading back in.

Out boats met up and returned to the cove and joined the rest of the class that had been doing the rescue swimming. We filled them in on what happened and how it went while the Coast Guard crew carried the Stokes basket with the body-bagged victim onto the dock to await the coroner.

We had eaten up some class time, obviously, in that pursuit. So we got a quick review of what the swimmers had been practicing and then broke for lunch. The body remained on the dock for most of our lunch period and then we were back in the water working on the skills that could maybe someday help us rescue someone like that.