An experienced California surfer riding the bore tide wave on Turnagain Arm near Anchorage credits Haines pool lifeguard Kaitlyn Tolin with saving his life after he found himself exhausted in a boil of water, unable to swim toward shore and without his surfboard.
“There was no way I was swimming against that thing… I was swallowing water. I could feel myself kind of giving up,” Adam de Boer said in an interview this week.
De Boer, 37, and lifelong surfing buddies Dave Imbaratto and David Boortz launched their surfboards a few miles north of Girdwood around 5 a.m. on Saturday, July 24. They had made the same ride the previous evening.
But on Saturday, when de Boer fell off his borrowed board, the “leash” attaching it to his ankle broke, leaving him in a strong current of icy water without a flotation device. He tried a “rip tide strategy,” swimming perpendicular to the pull of water, but it didn’t work.
Because it involves a large wave of water heading in one direction rushing over water that’s heading in the opposite direction, a bore tide wave creates a swirling effect in its aftermath.
“I tried swimming calmly, with a backstroke, but after a lot of that, I wasn’t getting anywhere. That’s when I really got scared,” de Boer said. He called out for help, though with the din created by roiling water, he wasn’t sure anyone heard him. At the early hour, few people were on shore to spot him. “When I tried to swim again, that’s when I realized how people can die.”
Fortunately for de Boer, Tolin, who was riding a red, inflatable paddleboard, had fallen off the same wave just a few seconds before he did. She was about 10 yards from shore and heard his shout from about 40 yards away.
“(De Boer) was trying to swim to the shoreline, but (the current) wasn’t in his favor. It was pushing him out further out,” Tolin said. “I fell off the wave at the right time” to rescue him, as his two friends and his riderless board were still riding the wave hundreds of yards away.
Arriving on her board, Tolin appeared like “an angel from above,” Tolin said. “She was very calm and all smiles and beautiful.”
Tolin said De Boer was floating on his back near a whirlpool when she arrived and pulled him aboard. “He was exhausted.”
De Boer said he has surfed in “enormous waves all over the world” including Indonesia, but he wasn’t prepared for the crazy-quilt current that a bore tide creates and 49-degree water. “It’s more serious than we thought. It’s creepy water. It’s whirlpools. It’s eddies you can’t see. The whole thing is riddled with threatening things.”
At the least, he and his two friends should have been wearing thicker wet suits and life jackets, he said. “It was so stupid… Without a PFD, if you lose your board, you’re screwed.”
Tolin, 31, is a surfer and also has worked as an ocean lifeguard in Ocean Dunes, Calif. since 2013. She said that simply belly riding on a surfboard, hanging on for the duration of a bore tide wave – a half-mile or more – can be exhausting.
She said that learning to swim in the ocean at an early age gave her the confidence to make the rescue.
De Boer, a professional artist, said as a thank-you he’ll make a painting for Tolin of her hometown beach in San Luis Obispo. “I really do think she saved my life.”