Like many adventurous Rhode Islanders, six Brown hockey players headed to the beach last Tuesday to test the choppy Atlantic Ocean churned up by Tropical Storm Irene. But for Mike Wolff '12, Jeff Ryan '13, Dennis Robertson '14, Mike Borge '14, assistant captain Bobby Farnham '12 and former Bear forward David Brownschidle '11, things quickly took a scary turn: The six had to perform a harrowing rescue of three swimmers caught in a riptide at South Shore Beach in Little Compton, R.I.
Though the beach was closed, the players estimated there were about 40 people on what Borge called a "secluded" shoreline. The water, they said, was relatively calm. They had not been in the water long when they swam out to a sandbar and saw two swimmers waving their arms and calling out.
The swimmers, two teenage girls, were "bobbing up and down," Wolff said. "They were waving at us," he said, "but we couldn't really hear what they were saying. So we swam over, and he eventually heard them yelling ‘Help! Help! We can't swim!'"
Wolff and Ryan hurried to the swimmers, who said they were fatigued, and grabbed hold of their arms to support them above the water. Holding onto the girls, the two Bears swam back to more shallow waters. And then the players learned there was another swimmer in trouble.
"I put the girl down and she could stand up, and she said ‘Will you help my boyfriend, too?'" Wolff said. "(Ryan and I) looked at each other, and we couldn't see her boyfriend anywhere in the water." Finally, Wolff said they spotted him past the breaking waves floating on his back.
"The kid looked kind of lifeless," Wolff said. "I thought it was a dead body."
With Wolff and Ryan in shallower water with the two girls, the four other players immediately began swimming in the direction of the boy. Robertson, who is a certified lifeguard and worked at an indoor pool in British Columbia, reached him first and propped his body up with his face out of the water. Robertson tried to communicate with the boy, but he was unresponsive.
"He was out of it for sure, but he was conscious and breathing," Robertson said. "He had swallowed a lot of water and was not in the best shape at all."
When Brownschidle, Farnham and Borge reached Robertson and the boy, they were able to move the boy onto a boogie board, which they had brought with them that day to ride the waves. Wolff took the surfboard the group had also taken along and paddled out to meet the others while Ryan waited with the girls. But a riptide threatened to thwart the rescue effort. "The riptide absolutely shot me out there," Wolff said.
"None of us are college swimmers or anything like that, and we had been swimming for a while now, so all of us were really tired."
After about three minutes of swimming parallel to the shore to get to calmer waters, the group finally was able to turn toward the beach. Ryan was able to come meet the group and pull them into the shallow water where they could stand. He and Robertson then carried the boy to shore.
But when the group finally reached the beach, the players said no one else on shore had realized what was going on.
"We were all standing there, panting and out of breath, and the lady next to us is still sitting there reading her book," Wolff said.
The players found the group the teens had come to the beach with, and told the boy's mother that she needed to take him to the hospital.
"He was still really pale and looked like he was going into shock," Ryan said.
The boy and his mother left immediately, and the players were never able to even learn any of the teens' names. The group has not heard from any of the three victims they rescued, or their families.
"It's crazy to think that something like that would happen and how lucky we were," Farnham said. "All of us were there and everyone contributed."
