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

CHARLOTTETOWN – A P.E.I. woman and her 12-year-old son were enjoying the beauty of an Island sunset and wading in the shallow waters of a beach she knew from her childhood when she said the sand suddenly fell away underfoot and the pair was swept out to sea in a matter of seconds.

Beth Johnston said she and her son, Charlie Ross, were standing in thigh-deep water near Savage Harbour on the Island’s north shore on Saturday shooting video with the young boy’s Go Pro camera when they lost their footing as a rip current pushed them quickly away from the shoreline under a darkening sky.

The 45-year-old mother of two young sons said Monday that she realized they were in trouble when Charlie said he couldn’t touch bottom, was scared and too tired to keep swimming, as waves smashed down on top of them and pushed them under.

“It was truly terrifying that something could happen that quickly in such a familiar place, that you could be in such danger within a matter of 30 seconds,” she said from her home in Charlottetown.

“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