Look at swimmers already in the water or at pieces of wood or seaweed floating on the surface, and note which way they’re moving and how fast. That will tell you how strong the drift is and how quickly you’ll be carried away from the point where you enter the water. The stronger the drift, the closer you should stay to shore and the more carefully you should plan where you want to exit the water, because here is another inexorable fact of ocean swimming:
You Cannot Swim Against a Strong Current
If you try, you will exhaust yourself and probably precipitate a chain of events that may lead to disaster: fatigue, gasping, breathing water, choking, panic, struggling for air, waving or calling for help, sinking, and, finally, drowning.
If you want to emerge from the water near your blanket, your Yoo-hoo, and your can of Pringles, walk up the beach in the opposite direction of the drift, enter the water, and let yourself float down the beach until you reach your exit point. Then swim gently across the drift toward shore. Otherwise, be prepared to float away from your home base and walk back when you’re finished swimming.
Under no circumstances should you try to swim against the current—the only exception being for swimmers with a lot of experience in the ocean and a dedication to vigorous exercise. For years I swam a mile a day for exercise, and when I was at the shore, I’d calculate the drift with the intent of swimming as hard as I could against it while managing to stay in place. I was always alert, though, for the onset of fatigue, and when I saw myself slipping away from a fixed point on the shore, I’d immediately swim across the drift and get out of the water.
There are a few naturally occurring phenomena that can sometimes (but not always) be seen from the shore, that can be deadly but don’t have to be, and that you can anticipate—just by being aware of them—whether or not you see them coming.
Undertow
This is a term that is universally known and widely misunderstood. Many people use undertow to mean any action of waves, currents, or tides that can jeopardize their safety. In fact, undertow is a very specific phenomenon that occurs mostly on narrow beaches with steep scarps, or drop-offs. It is, simply, the action of water thrown ashore by a wave returning whence it came.
After a wave breaks, gravity will carry the water back to sea. If the drop-off into the sea is steep, the water will fall sharply, carrying you with it. If you don’t struggle or resist, the undertow will carry you for a few feet (perhaps more, but not much more) and will then dissipate. Buoyed by the air in your lungs, you will rise to the surface, and you can swim back to shore. You may find yourself in water over your head, but if you’re not comfortable being in water deeper than you are tall, you are, in the purest sense of the phrase, out of your depth.
Runout or Sea Puss
A common cause of multiple simultaneous problems is known both as a “runout” and a “sea puss.” Somewhere offshore of a relatively straight beach there will be an invisible sandbar or shoal that has built up over a long period. Untold millions of tons of water will flow over the bar toward shore, until, at last, the level of the water inside the bar exceeds the water level outside the bar, at which moment, inevitably, the water must begin to flow back seaward.
If there is a weak spot in the sandbar, it may collapse and create a funnel-like path through the bar. The enormous volume of water—which always seeks the easiest path to equilibrium—will rush toward the funnel with unimaginable power and irresistible force.
Runouts happen frequently, and they can be seen from the beach. People watching one have described the scene as like seeing the entire ocean running down a drain. A strip of water leading out to sea, perhaps ten yards wide, perhaps fifty, will look different from the rest of the ocean. It will definitely have its own motion; it may contain short, choppy, foamy waves; the water will look murky and sandy from turbulence; all manner of flotsam—pieces of wood, seaweed, trash—will be speeding seaward in the strip. If there is wave action over the sandbar, the runout will appear as a gap in the surf, for this is where the bar has collapsed. Once beyond the sandbar, the strip will vanish as the water disperses and the runout has … well … run out.
For veteran surfers, runouts are a blessing, for they provide effortless transport over the bar and beyond the waves. Surfers know that if at any point they change their minds, they can return to calm water simply by paddling across the runout until they’re out of it.
Swimmers caught in runouts have that option, too, but most either don’t know it or, in shock and surprise, forget it. They panic and, intuitively, try to resist the force of the runout instead of, counterintuitively, surrendering to it and, when they’re ready, swimming across and out of it.
Swimmers have another option, too, but it takes a cool head and a practiced eye to choose it. If a swimmer caught in a runout can see the sandbar offshore (or the waves breaking on it) and can determine that it isn’t too far to swim safely back from, she can—no kidding—relax and enjoy the ride. The runout will carry the swimmer past the bar and, perhaps twenty or twenty-five yards farther out, will dissipate, leaving her to return to shore—maybe even pleasantly, by riding one or more of the waves that break over the bar.
That second option may be a bit more of a challenge than the average swimmer wants to assume, but once more, if you’re not fit enough to swim, kick, float, or dog-paddle for a couple of hundred yards in the ocean, don’t go in.
Undertows and runouts are phenomena that affect only swimmers, for they occur in the water, or, in the case of runouts, offshore. You can’t be caught in one if you don’t go swimming. That’s not quite the statement-of-the-obvious that it appears, for there is one ocean imp that can reach up onto the beach and grab you (or, especially, your small child) and drag you into deep water. An old Environmental Science Services pamphlet called it a “killer at the seashore.” Its common name is a “rip.”
Rip
The reason a rip is so dangerous is that it actually forms on the beach. Children wading in the wave wash where a rip begins—like the four in Queens mentioned earlier—can be knocked off their feet and sucked out to sea in a matter of seconds.
Beaches are, by nature, unstable. The mixture of sand, pebbles, rocks, shells, vegetation, and water that makes up a beach is soft and malleable, and its contours change with every wave that passes through and over it. All day long erosion creates small depressions, in random sequence, up and down the beach. Water from returning waves will gravitate toward the depressions, scouring them deeper and wider and creating, very quickly, a strong seaward pull—a rip.
If a child is standing at the edge of such a depression, the ground will suddenly disappear and the child will be sucked away from shore. If the natural slope of the beach is long, gentle, and shallow, the child may be able to struggle out of the rip, sideways, into calm water. But if the slope is short and steep, the child will be in turbulent, deep water before he can catch a breath.
Rips resemble runouts in both appearance and solution. Like a runout, a rip is a strip of rough, murky, foamy water moving directly away from the beach. A rip begins right at the beach, however, and it tends to be narrower than a runout, anywhere from a few feet to a few yards wide. It doesn’t travel as far—dissipating, usually, just beyond the breakers—and it can end as abruptly and unpredictably as it began, while other ones may be forming at other spots along the same beach.
A swimmer caught in a rip has the same options as a swimmer caught in a runout: swim across the rip until you’re out of it, or let it carry you out until its force fades away. Whatever you do, don’t fight it; don’t try to swim straight back to the beach. That way lies exhaustion, panic, and, perhaps, drowning.
To me, one of the saddest aspects of drowning is that it is so often unnecessary, the result of compounding a simple error or two.
Years ago, I wrote a piece for The New York Times Magazine on how to swim safely in the ocean, and in it I quoted a description of a typical drowning victim, told to me by a veteran Red Cross safety expert
named Mike Howes:
“He [the hypothetical victim] decides he’s in trouble, so to attract attention he waves his arms over his head, which puts a lot of meat out of water—where it’s heavier—and makes him sink. He struggles up again, gasps for breath, then waves his arms again and sinks again. If he left his arms in the water and waved them slowly up and down, he’d stay on the surface. But he doesn’t, so he gets water in his mouth; his epiglottis slams shut, and he panics. He coughs, sinks, coughs under water, gasps, and—well, that’s it.”
What most swimmers fail to realize is that if they are uninjured and even marginally competent, they can save themselves. In all but the roughest and coldest seas, they can stay afloat indefinitely. They can also, without great effort, propel themselves toward shore. They may end up several miles from where they entered the water, but they’ll be alive to gripe about the walk home.
One day in my late teens I was swimming with a friend off the south shore of Nantucket when we found ourselves trapped offshore, beyond the breaking point of endless, tremendous waves. There were no surfboards, body boards, or boogie boards back then—at least not on Nantucket—so all we had for flotation and transportation were our own air-filled lungs and our own strong young arms and legs. We had been riding the waves happily for an hour or so and had paid no attention to where we were in relation to the shore. We weren’t aware that we had been swept away from the long, sloping beach where the waves broke in regular, predictable rhythms and carried us all the way in to knee-deep water. Now, we were surprised to find, we were far offshore of a steep, relatively short beach and a precipitous hidden sandbar that, together, produced row after row of tall, rough waves that crested high and broke almost straight downward.
We would try to ride a wave, but instead of being carried gently ashore, we would be slammed violently onto the hard-sand bottom, “boiled” mercilessly in the sandy foam, and then propelled upward to more or less the same place where we had begun—just in time to duck under another monster wave, and another. After making virtually no progress for, I don’t know, ten, fifteen minutes, we were both exhausted. We knew that our only salvation lay offshore, in the calm water beyond the waves.
Turning seaward, we swam under breaking wave after breaking wave until, finally, we reached open water where ocean swells had not yet become waves.
We were, we guessed, between a quarter and half a mile offshore. Though from this prospect we couldn’t see the waves actually breaking onshore, we could see their massive shoulders gather and hunch before they disappeared, to be instantly followed by the next rank of waves and the next.
We knew very well that there was no way we were going to make it to shore in these conditions. We also knew, though, that we had nothing, really, to worry about. Nantucket was only fourteen miles long; we had entered the water at approximately the midpoint of the island; we were heading westward where, at the end of the island, shallow shoals extended far offshore.
We were cold, yes, because the water temperature was only in the upper seventies, but if we stayed active, we could keep from freezing for many hours. Save for an unimaginable stroke of bad luck—being eaten by something, say, or being run down by a nuclear submarine, the odds against both of which were similarly astronomical—we could float safely indefinitely, or at least until we reached a time of slack tide or a point at which we could walk ashore.
We’d be inconvenienced, surely, and grumpy and tired and cold. We’d be forced to hitch a ride, soaking wet and sandy, back to our car. But we would be alive.
It took four hours, but that’s what happened. Along the way, we passed several populated beaches—the people were so far away that they resembled the tiny virtual passengers on the cinematic Titanic—even one overseen by a lifeguard, but we raised no alarm, for we didn’t want to put anyone’s life in jeopardy by asking them to rescue us. Besides, we were fine; we didn’t need rescue.
Sometime in midafternoon, we came to a part of the island where the shoals extended so far out to sea that wave action ceased—there was no shelving beach for them to break on—and was replaced by a short, confused chop that we could, at first, swim through and then, at last, wade through.
We were everything I described above, plus chastened and grateful. I said a silent “thank-you” to the uncle of my childhood.
Drownproofing: A Survival Technique
Everyone who would swim in the sea should be compelled to learn an excellent survival technique called “drownproofing,” invented in the 1940s by a swimming coach named Fred Lanoue. Endorsed by the U.S. Public Health Service and taught at many schools, it’s easy to learn and, as much as anything can be, idiotproof. (It is not, however, panicproof. Nothing is.)
The two premises of drownproofing are: (1) most people will float if their lungs are filled with air; and (2) it’s much easier and less tiring to float vertically than horizontally. Most people’s bodies want to float vertically, buoyed by the two big air sacs (the lungs) that stay near the surface, and with the heavy (bony and muscular) hips and legs dangling beneath.
Here’s how to drownproof yourself:
Floating vertically, with your hands limp at your sides, take a deep breath, hold it, and let yourself hang there, with your face in the water and (optional but more relaxing) your eyes closed.
As soon as you feel that you’d like to take a breath—long before that awful feeling when you know you must—exhale slowly through your nose. Raise your arms, and cross them in front of your face. Spread them as if you were parting curtains, and when your arms are extended, push your palms down toward your sides and tilt your head back. Your mouth will come out of the water. Take a breath, lower your head and arms, and let yourself bob in the water.
Every movement should be easy, deliberate, unhurried. You’re not trying to go anywhere; there’s no rush and no worry. When you hear your pulse—and you will, for the rhythms of your body become the focus of your mind—it should sound normal, not rapid. Fear and excitement waste energy and oxygen.
I can hear you muttering, “Easy for you to say.” But that’s why you’re practicing, so that if and when the time comes for you to save yourself, you’ll be ready.
It won’t take you long to feel at ease with the technique of drownproofing. When you do, leisurely lift your head out of the water, flutter-kick gently until your body is horizontal, and then—on your back, with your hands paddling easily at your sides—kick as often as is comfortable in the general direction of the shore.
If you tire, stop kicking, let your legs hang down again, and resume the drownproofing breathing until you feel you’re ready to carry on. Remind yourself that you’re not trying to “beat” the sea, nor is it trying to beat you.
We humans sometimes have an unfortunate tendency to anthropomorphize not only animals but the sea itself. We use words like treacherous, savage, and killer to describe natural phenomena like waves, currents, and storms. It is, I think, a symptom of our refusal to admit that we must coexist with nature, not compete with it or attempt to dominate it.
We are nature, and nature is us. We are of the sea and from the sea, and if we choose to venture into the sea, we must respect and appreciate it for what it is: an environment that is different but not hostile, accommodating to the educated and prepared, and fatal mostly to the foolhardy.
9
How to Avoid Shark Attack
You’ve heard and read it a thousand times: the chances of your being killed by a shark are so tiny as to not be worth worrying about.
The odds against being attacked by a shark are nearly as long, but the issue here is as much semantic as statistical. Very, very few encounters between swimmers or snorkelers and sharks result in what could be considered an actual attack.
I think of an attack as what a grizzly bear does when she’s protecting her cubs, or what wolves, bears, and even rats do when they’re cornered or threatened. In general, sharks do not attack people; the exceptions happen mostly to scuba divers who unwittingly venture a
cross an invisible line that a shark considers to be its territorial border and then either don’t see, don’t understand, or choose to ignore the obvious warnings issued by the shark.
When a shark feels threatened or crowded, or when it senses that its territory is being violated, its posture changes; its back hunches; its pectoral fins drop; sometimes it shakes its head back and forth; always it looks and acts agitated. It is saying—broadcasting, shouting—“Get out of here! This is my turf.” Fish get the message; they scatter and disappear into the reef. People sometimes don’t, with the result that the shark attacks: it rushes in, bites, and, usually, retreats to wait and see if the intruder withdraws.
For the most part, what we’re talking about when we use the words shark attack are really shark bites, one step in the shark’s normal feeding pattern, motivated not by rage, fear, or frenzy but by curiosity, confusion, and hunger.
Semantics aside, the chances of your being bitten by a shark are ridiculously small. If you added up the shark-bite incidents reported around the world in a given year and divided the total by the number of man-hours spent in the water, you’d get some unfathomable figure like .000003, which would enlighten you not at all.
But if you swim in the sea, there does exist a tiny chance of your being bitten by a shark. The good news is that there are ways to reduce that chance to very close to zero.
Over the past twenty-five years, in the United States and many other countries around the world, there has been a vast shift in population toward the seashore. In the U.S. alone, some 50 percent of our 280 million people now live within fifty miles of the shore. Millions of people who did not grow up near the sea and who know nothing about it are now exposing themselves to the sea, with all its beauty, power, mystery, and danger.