[COLVERT]

Originally Posted by WillyHeckaslike

The guy was lucky indeed ... if not a miraculous escape. If the sea was powerful enough to flatten him and pull him off the foreshore then it would have, noise of the force of the sea and its pummeling nature, have pounded him against the sea wall. Courtesy of my dad, I've seen what the power of the sea can do to substantial Victorian bollards on a pier of Victorian vintage. Substantial heavy metal bollards bent like pieces of plastic. He, and my mum, paid for my lessons to further educate me regards this and how best to avoid if not try to survive the circumstance. The sea, the tides, the rivers and the forces of nature which I feel should be part of the curriculum of a maritime nation. Where I live it saddens me that lives are lost on an all-too-frequent basis to the aforementioned. Sometimes kids playing chicken with the sea but sometimes adults who might have been lucky with doing so in the past. And then there is a lack of understanding about the danger of the rest. The tides and the river flows can change with great force to pull you off your feet and suck you away to your death. The depth of water does not have to be great to be a danger ... but, then again, more than a few will have succumbed to injury by failing to gauge the depth in a municipal swimming pool.

As you say--very lucky---there were no other people about and it was by sheer chance that I heard him.

There were step built into the steep sea wall to allow, in normal times, people to get down to the beach. Unfortunately these were20 yards away along the beach and were invisible in the pitch black of the night and sea.

Pulling the guy towards these steps also pulled him towards the vertical concrete against which the waves were smashing them selves. It was very worrying that he might not have made it. Luckily we got him there. He was suffering from hypothermia and could not have kept his grip on the life ring for much longer.--However all's well that ends well.
Once I'd got the guy to put his headthrough the life ring