Firefighter who pulled driver from ocean says more surf rescue swimmers needed on Sonoma Coast

The woman in the water was barely conscious when Sonoma County Fire District Capt. Heath Lesik swam through the surf to her.

It was in the early morning hours Wednesday. She was perhaps 100 feet off Duncan’s Landing and was bruised and “icy cold” from being in the chilly ocean water.

She also had other unseen injuries suffered when her car plunged off the Sonoma Coast.

Lesik splashed water at her as he approached to alert her he was there and to gauge her state of mind.

It wasn’t clear why she had gone off the cliff and ended up in the ocean. He needed to know if she would be combative or if she would be so panicked that she would climb on him and potentially take him under.

But she was placid, floating on her back, unable to cling to his rescue buoy on her own. He placed it under her arms and clipped the ends together so he could swim her back through the waves to shore, where paramedics awaited. The woman was “kind of mumbling to herself” but compliant.

“I’m amazed she was able to get out of her vehicle,” Lesik said.

After 19 years of fire service, including an early-career stint with the Bodega Bay Fire Protection District, Lesik, 42, thinks this was his first surf rescue with the Sonoma County Fire District, which absorbed the Bodega Bay agency and many others during a period of consolidations the past few years.

Certified in 2016, he is one of just two trained surf rescue swimmers on the countywide district’s suppression staff of 91 firefighters, and the only one who works full time.

Though he mostly works in the Windsor station, Lesik just happened to be putting in overtime in Bodega Bay when the report of a vehicle over the cliff seven miles away came in shortly before 8 a.m. Wednesday. So it was lucky timing, if that can be said.

But he and others in the department are developing a program they hope will eventually train enough people to staff Bodega Bay 24 hours a day with a rescue swimmer to support California State Park lifeguards who patrol more than 55 miles of busy, rugged shoreline — mostly, with too few people.

It’s an extremely ambitious goal, given the physical and mental requirements of those willing to heave themselves into brisk, rocky surf with little notice and limited information about the medical and emotional condition of the person they are striving to help.

Unforgiving waves and sharks

For starters, they need to be able to swim 1,000 yards in 20 minutes, Lesik said.

The Sonoma Coast is notoriously tricky, particularly in winter. There are surfing, boating and kayaking accidents, crashes that land people in the water, unobservant beachgoers who may be washed off shore or off the shoreline rocks.

The waves can be high and unforgiving, and a rescue swimmer needs not only an extreme level of physical fitness and strength, but a profound level of comfort and familiarity with the conditions that comes from being in the water a lot, those involved in the program said.

The individual needs to be able to size up the surf in front of them, maybe in poor weather or after dark, and determine whether a rescue is even possible, said Nate Buck, a longtime State Park lifeguard-turned-Tiburon firefighter/paramedic, who serves as ready volunteer rescue swimmer for Sonoma Fire after years of filling the role for Bodega Bay Fire.

“Making that ‘go/no go’ decision, it’s a lot of pressure,” said Buck, who will be helping develop the surf rescue swim program. “They’re sometimes dying in front of you.”

They need to have peace with the ocean’s might and be able to suppress panic if the waves overcome you, push you under and subject you to “the washing machine,” as longtime Bodega Bay Fire Chief Sean Grinnell, now Sonoma Fire’s division chief for safety and training, calls it.

It’s also very “sharky” area — part of the so-called “red triangle” off Monterey Bay, Santa Cruz and the Sonoma Coast, with the most documented shark attacks in the world, said Loren Rex, public safety superintendent for the state parks’ Sonoma-Mendocino Coast District.

‘Farther to go’

The fire district recently passed three people through the qualifying swim so they can move onto surf rescue training and is preparing to survey the department for more interested recruits, Grinnell said.

Surf rescue response has different requirements than open water or flood rescue swimmers, all of which are necessary to meet the current and future needs of a county with miles of ocean front and watershed subject to flooding and sea level rise, Grinnell said.

“One of the things that was obvious last year was we are able to put an awful lot of people onto flood rescue” during extreme winter weather, Grinnell said. “We have a lot farther to go with surf rescue.”

But getting out past the waves is especially challenging and adds an extra dimension to swim rescue.

“The surf entry, the shore entry, is the big one,” said Sonoma Fire Capt. Justin Fox. “That’s, like, the defining line.”

Lesik and Buck liken surf rescue work as “a lifestyle.” It requires more than simply training or passing a test but a commitment to be in the water regularly to maintain fitness and knowledge of the ocean.

Both are avid surfers who live in Bodega Bay and regularly listen for radio calls that may require their response — not because of “obligation,” said Lesick, but because “I want to.”

“You have to be a water dog, and you have to love it,” Grinnell said. “You need to have that comfort, because it’s different every day.”

The surf rescue program, in many ways, has been inherited by the larger district from the now subsumed Bodega Bay fire department, which had worked in past years to develop a marine boat and swim rescue program in collaboration with the State Parks regional district and the U.S. Coast Guard. The Sonoma County Sheriff’s helicopter crew also is a regular partner.

The aim was “filling in gaps” in an area averaging 30 emergency water calls a year, at least a third of them requiring a swimmer, said Fox, who developed the original program for Bodega Bay.

Coast Guard boats can’t operate in near-shore and shallow waters, for instance. State park lifeguards are only on duty during the day and are hampered by unremitting staffing shortages for the past half decade or more amid a nationwide lifeguard shortage.

A single person on duty could be up at Salt Point State Park when a rescue off Jenner or Bodega Bay is needed.

With longtime Supervising Lifeguard Tim Murphy about to retire, Rex said, the Sonoma Coast will be left with an acting supervising lifeguard, Clark Hale, and another full-time guard, plus three seasonal lifeguards, one working part time.

He said he’s eager to see rescue staffing beefed up on the coast. “I think everyone sees the need for that,” Rex said.

Shock and adrenaline

On Wednesday, Hale, with state parks, was among those who responded to the woman in the water, arriving after Lesik, who was the captain on duty in Bodega Bay and arrived in a fire engine at a trail head he knew would take him down to the shoreline.

He turned over incident command to his fire engineer, grabbed his ever-present rescue gear, pulled on a wet suit and felt the shock and adrenaline rush that always comes with the first flush of cold water over his face.

Inside the cove south of Duncan’s Landing, the water was relatively subdued — the wind ”just coming up” and “a little chop on the water” — as he swam to what he thought was an unconscious person. After equipping her with the flotation buoy, he pulled her back to shore, where the crew rigged up a rope rescue to bring her up to the top of the bluff in an immobilizing litter. She was eventually flown by air ambulance to a Santa Rosa hospital.

In the meantime, Hale arrived and dove into the water to find the woman’s submerged car and confirm no one was in it.

Eventually, he and Lesik got the car hooked up so it could be hoisted up the side of the cliff and towed away after several hours.

“I’m just glad that Sonoma County Fire is allowing us to continue this program,” he said. “Our coastline is getting busy, with tourism and people moving out there. The lifeguards need help out there.”

“We want to be able to assist them as much as possible, wherever we can.”

You can reach Staff Writer Mary Callahan (she/her) at 707-521-5249 or mary.callahan@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MaryCallahanB.