Letter: Don’t blame the tourists

I always feel a shudder of trepidation when I see the visitors streaming into our beautiful town at this time of the year.

Our lovely beaches and warm ocean currents are mesmerizingly enticing, but they hide a terrible secret.

For when you are at your most relaxed and carefree, with the sun beating down on the softly curling ocean, you will be lured into the luxurious warm, satin-shining water. And then slowly as you sway in the warm womb-like caress of the waves, you will begin to realise that the trap has already been sprung.

At first you will just feel that the current seems a little more forceful against your body, no worries, time to go back to the beach anyway. Then you will cease to feel the soft sandy bottom, your swimming seems to have no impact, in fact no matter how hard you swim towards the shore, you seem to be getting dragged further out to sea.

No one is looking, very quickly you are past the back line and the normal visual eyeline of most people sat on the beach. You swim harder, forgetting everything you have ever known about what to do when a rip tide pulls you out to sea. You start to panic. Try to keep breathing, and can’t believe that amongst all this holiday happiness and relaxation no one can hear you scream.

It fleetingly passes through your mind the warnings about only swimming in lifeguard beaches, but who wants to cram on the only beach, with hundreds of people, when there are so many other beautiful beaches on this area of coast, everybody goes in the water when it’s hot, no matter which beach they are on, don’t they?

The last thought that invades your mind as you try and look up to the clear blue sky, “this can’t be happening.”

We let this happen every year, over and over and over again. There is NO substitute for Lifeguards, no amount of posters and lame words of advice from our current municipal lifeguards to only use the one or two beaches we can bothered to protect.

Yes, we all understand that there is NO budget, saving lives is always bottom of the agenda.

But we CAN sort this. We have enough minds and big hearts in this community to come up with a solution to ensure we don’t lose one more mother, father, son, daughter, grandma grandpa or honeymoon couple to our unforgiving ocean.

We have a huge untapped resource of qualified, able and available 16 to 25-year-old Junior and Senior Lifeguards that compete and qualify as a national sport. Many live in our town and would love to have the opportunity to work throughout the holiday season.

Unfortunately, at the moment they are often seen as a threat to jobs and livelihoods from our municipal lifeguards and don’t always get a warm welcome on our beaches. In fact, one municipal lifeguard called the police to remove my son from the beach, because he was practicing for his lifeguard practical examination. We were told that only municipal lifeguards are allowed on the beach with a lifeguard torpedo buoy, this is to protect their jobs.

I’m sure many recreational lifeguards would work for tourist donations, this would not affect the municipal coffers in any way. But it most certainly would save lives.

Don’t blame the tourists, they cannot be expected to understand our complex ocean currents. We encourage the tourists to our town, we want to boost our coffers, we therefore have a responsibility to protect them.

ANDREA SHARROCK

Salt Rock