It's good but not perfect since the lifeguard thankfully rescues them before they drown but it's still a good exercise. I can do this exercise fairly reliably but I'm not perfect either.
Seems insane to allow non-swimmers to use floating tubes that can flip over without also wearing personal flotation devices.
Even with a lifeguard, what if multiple people need saving at the same time, or the lifeguard just doesn't notice it after a long time with no interventions require.
>"Seems insane to allow non-swimmers to use floating tubes that can flip over without also wearing personal flotation devices."
Years ago I worked as a lifeguard at a public pool where the policy was no flotation devices unless you proved yourself a capable swimmer (able to confidently swim 50 yards.) The rule seemed counter-intuitive for a lot of people, but I'd say it worked well. We never had any flotation-related incidents.
Nonswimmers needed to stay in the shallow end (where to be sure there was still a drowning risk) and because they had to not use any floats, the chance they'd panick was reduced (panicking usually happens when conditions suddenly change, such as when somebody falls off a pool noodle even if the water is shallow enough to stand up.) Taking floats away from non-swimmers, as well as some other common sense policy such as no rough-housing, greatly reduces the chance of anything going wrong.
I remember experiencing exactly that failure mode as a kid-- slipping off of a floatie in the deep end before I was a confident swimmer and needing to be rescued.
Not the OP, and I've only watched ~8 of those videos, but it seems pretty safe to say they are non-swimmers. Is there a reason you think I'm jumping to that conclusion?
On what basis do you assume they are non-swimmers? The video doesn't show them swimming - well sure they were in a tube of course it doesn't show them swimming. Just because you can swim fine doesn't mean you will do so when you flip unexpectedly out of a tube when the panic response takes over.
And for completeness, the third one I saw: are you seriously suggesting that you can judge someone's swimming ability from her response after this flip? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STY8N-33-tQ
With respect to that last example: a flip like that can be very disorienting, and even a skilled swimmer can be imperiled like that if they fail to disentangle their legs. She did manage to free her legs and right herself, but at that point in her panicked state she failed to tread water. I would say she was a poor swimmer, if not a nonswimmer. Possibly able to swim while under normal ideal conditions but forgot how to when disoriented. It's not impossible but it seems very unlikely that she was a skilled swimmer.
- Once you start drowning, you don't look like a good swimmer no matter if you're Phelps or not
- Videos selected specifically to have people who start drowning in them will show people at their absolute worst swimming moment
- You do not have to be a poor swimmer to start drowning at your worst moment
- There is no reason to think that the drowners wouldn't have passed a "do three laps in the pool and tread water for N minutes" type test
- Requiring a basic swim competency before being allowed to use floats will no doubt reduce the risk of these incidents and is reasonable to do regardless
If you saw a video of a car crash, would you assume that driver had not taken driver's ed? Or rather that they were careless or caught by surprise or had a malfunction or hit a sudden patch of ice or even were intoxicated?
If the lesson you took from this was "this pool was irresponsible in allowing these obviously terrible swimmers in" then you got completely the wrong message. Please don't take the fact that your kid passed her swim test at Girl Scouts to mean that she too won't flip off a tube suddenly, gulp in water down the wrong way and be overcome by our animal instincts. Such an assumption is literally dangerous.
> "- There is no reason to think that the drowners wouldn't have passed a "do three laps in the pool and tread water for N minutes" type test"
Just to be clear so you understand where I'm coming from, I'd say that somebody who could do three laps but not four is a poor swimmer. 75 yards (or even 150 meters assuming a 50 meter pool) is a very lax standard for calling somebody a swimmer. Technically yes, it proves you can swim. But it certainly doesn't prove you're good at it.
In my experience one of the core facets of being a skilled swimmer is being less likely to panic (the others being endurance and technical skill.) Without one of these three it's easy to find yourself in hot water. Technical skill is important because without enough of it, even a very fit person will reach the limits of their endurance quickly. A cool head is important because if you panic, your technical skill can't be put into practice (this is the most difficult part of teaching most kids how to swim. A lot of time goes into making them comfortable in the water so that they're less likely to panic. I've still got that damn "wheels on the bus" song stuck in my head many years later...) Endurance is arguably the least important of the three, provided you have a cool head and sufficient technical skill to float on your back until rescued, but it's still obviously important.
The reason I'm saying that person is probably a poor swimmer at best is because of the severity of the circumstances that caused her to panic. It's unlikely but not impossible that a skilled swimmer would panic when unexpectedly dunked like that. I'm trying not to speak in absolutes. Maybe she's a skilled swimmer who got a lung-full of water when she went over backwards, but that's less likely than her being a poor swimmer or nonswimmer. I've seen a lot of skilled swimmers put themselves in much worse situations than that and recover from it fine. I'm sure sometimes they don't, but most of the time they do. I once saw a very skilled swimmer full of teenage bravado do a cannonball jump into the middle of a floating pool cover, a literal death trap, but he didn't panic and got out of it alive.
Whether or not she attended drivers ed, aka swimming lessons, I cannot say. For all I know she might have several weeks of swim practice under her belt, or zero. Some people take to swimming very quickly, while other people struggle with it despite the best efforts of the instructors. Attending swimming lessons doesn't make you a good swimmer anymore than attending drivers ed makes you a good driver. It aims to, but won't necessarily succeed.
>And for completeness, the third one I saw: are you seriously suggesting that you can judge someone's swimming ability from her response after this flip?
Yes. A thousand times, yes. That is not a strong swimmer.
Please explain why you think that! You literally just see her sitting on a tube, fall over while shrieking and then start drowning because she probably swallowed water the wrong way while shrieking and falling into the water. At that point, it's game over, doesn't matter how good a swimmer she is because she's literally not in control of her body.
Edit: to be clear, I agree that she's very unlikely to be a local swim champion or something. What I am claiming is that even a standard knows-how-to-swim 9 year old can start drowning like that.
Yea but that's the difference between knows-how-to-swim and being a strong swimmer. If she was a strong swimmer she would be in control of her body after something as trivial as flipping out of a tube.
> rescuing drowning victims is how good swimmers drown
This, absolutely. People are heavy; drowning people can and will drag you with them due to the instinctual response. Even a child can be quite dangerous to rescue if you're untrained. Call the lifeguards if you see someone drowning, especially if you've never taken any form of lifeguard training.
Well that page is scary. I don't want to admit how much I had to rewatch the first video until I figured someone bonked themself with a damn floating donut and almost drowned. And even then I was at like 3 of 8-10.
> "Not as a replacement for lifeguards, but to help them."
You'd need very careful lifeguard training for such a system at the very least. If it worked 95% of the time, a lifeguard may become complacent with manually scanning each swimmer.
I'd wager the most effective measure is hiring redundant lifeguards and encouraging them to keep each other honest. Have overlap in each lifeguards area of responsibility, and cycle lifeguards through different posts a few times per hour to combat fatigue. Of course this costs more, but frankly lifeguards are damn cheap when you consider the importance of their job.
That's a great point, certainly you wouldn't want to breed a culture where the life guards were playing cards back in the staff room with one ear cocked for the "silent sentry" going off to warn of a drowning.
I'd probably deploy it as an almost invisible thing that the staff never interacted with, and dial its detection way down until it virtually never gave a false positive, even if that meant it missed 20% of the actual drownings (those people are no worse off). Anything to avoid complacency, even one false alarm every couple of months would be too much.
The UI would be an earsplitting siren followed by a Robocop like voice shouting e.g. "someone is drowning in lane 5, 50 meter point".
I witnessed once a guy drowning in the sea. There were signs all over the beach that it was very dangerous to swim there at that time of the year. The sea was a bit rough but the waves weren't that impressive. Nonetheless, a guy went for a dip although not very far in the sea, maybe waist-level. Eventually, he realized he wasn't able to go back to the beach, got carried by the current and called for help. Fortunately, he was rescued by a surfer.
I certainly wouldn't have gone in the sea considering all the warnings, but at the same time, I didn't really think the guy was in danger while being so close to the beach. I think it was a good lesson.
That sounds like a rip current. A rip current moves out to sea faster than you can swim, but they typically aren’t very wide. The key is to swim parallel to the shore till you’re out of the current, then you can swim in. It can be scary though and obviously panicking is about the worst thing you can do. People will often try to swim against the current till they tire and then they unfortunately may drown.
You can sometimes identify a rip current from the beach as a stream of bubbles/whitewash moving out to sea by they are often hard to spot.
I've always heard them called "rip tides", not "rip currents".
But whatever you call them, I got caught by one many years ago, when I was a kid.
It was Wrightsville Beach, near Wilmington NC. My friend and I were swimming near the pier.
It was all fun and games, for what seemed like a short time.
We kept checking, and the pier never moved. Until one time we checked, and the pier was gone.
Well, really we were gone and we didn't realize it. We were so far out into the ocean that we could barely see the end of the pier, much less the beach. I don't know how far out we were, but research indicates the pier is currently 1200 feet long. Ask yourself how far out you would have to be and not be able to see the pier from that far out.
Fortunately, I had been well-taught in school, and knew that we had to swim perpendicular (well, more diagonal) to the tide. We couldn't fight the tide and try to swim directly to shore, otherwise we would tire out and never make it. That part had been drilled into my head quite well by the school system of Wilmington, NC.
So, we started swimming perpendicular to the tide.
I also know that we couldn't swim south, since that's the direction the pier was in, and we didn't want to risk running into the pier.
So, we swam north. For what seemed like miles. We managed to keep the beach in view, barely.
When we did finally make land, it was way the bleeping heck to the north. We definitely couldn't see the pier from there.
So, we started our long trek to the south, walking through the wet sand, because we didn't have shoes.
I don't know how long it actually took to get back to where our parents were, but it sure seemed like hours and hours.
When we finally got there, they had never noticed that we had drifted out too far, or that we were gone at all.
Things could have turned out very differently, if not for the school system of Wilmington, NC.
Funny, I grew up in Miami but currently live in Raleigh and have been to the NC beaches many times. I'm pretty sure I always knew them as rip currents. But now I wonder if I learned them as tides and started calling them currents at somepoint. Tides is definitely a misnomer:
> Rips are a complex, dynamic hazard and the multitude of variables—swimming ability, current strength, circulation, wave size—make the threat nearly impossible to solve with one-size-fits-all advice. No single “escape strategy” is appropriate all the time, the group now says, and lifeguards in Australia currently recommend combining the advice from both MacMahan’s circulation concept and traditionalists like Brewster. If you’re not a strong swimmer, stay afloat and signal for help; if you can swim, consider paddling parallel to the beach toward breaking waves—though be mindful of the potential circulating current. “All responses,” the group concedes, “have their pitfalls.”
A friend of mine is an experienced sailor and kayak driver. As he put it: A bad current moves several tons of water per minute. That small wave has more weight than you do, even on a small space. Doesn't matter if you're 300 pound muscle or 400 pound fat, you go where the current goes.
If the current is 3 mph, and you can swim at 4 mph, then you will be swimming for a very long time at the effective 1 mph to get back to shore. And if on the way you need to stop for even a minute's rest, you'll lose 4 minutes worth of your hard-won progress.
This video actually shows the Hollywood styled drowning. It can look a lot different from this, and I suspect that’s what the original article is about, though it’s currently unavailable so who knows.
People who are drowning can look like they are just floating, or sitting in the water, with their heads barely sticking out and no splashing, yelling or any sort of alarming thing going on. The reason for this is that they are dog paddling in an upright position, but rarely get their mouths and noses out of the water. They can be in this situation for quite a while before they actually drown, with no real visible signs.
We’re a costal nation(Denmark) and each year tourists drown. It’s especially tragic when children drown 10-15 meters from their parents that never noticed something was wrong.
If anyone especially children is dead quiet in the water you definitely have to check if they are ok.
Agreed. I've seen this come around every summer for the past few years, and I don't mind reading it again (especially considering I'm up at the cottage right now with our young children).
Site unavailable due to capacity problems. However, as others have pointed out, this (or similar) articles have been submitted and discussed many, many times.
That doesn't make it interesting or unimportant, and I respectfully suggest people should read some of them.
Do not take advice on HN (or any Internet forum) about situations involving safety; people on the Internet don't know what they are talking about, even when they sound competent or claim credentials (do I really need to say that?) and someone could get seriously hurt or killed. Unless you are an expert, you can't tell the good advice from the bad; find an authoritative source.
And in fact, if you read further down the linked thread, someone asked an apparent professional about the advice; they did not give a favorable response and called part of it dangerous.
By all means ignore it if you choose, and of course, feel free to warn people off it. However, if you read further down the HN thread the advice is reinforced multiple times.
> natep : As a former lifeguard (certification has expired), I agree with btilly.
> 3pt14159 : As a former Bronze Cross I also agree with btilly.
There's more.
And as a further data point, I've also undergone substantial amounts of training, and btilly's advice exactly matches what I was taught.
So with respect, I repeat my advice that what btilly wrote pretty much nails it, and people should read it.
In this case the advise is spot on (i.e. don't get within arms reach of someone who is drowning unless you know what you're doing). I think warning people that the situation is more dangerous than it appears is consistent with your advice that you should rely on experts when possible.
At the risk of "claiming credentials", I'm a paramedic with swift-water rescue training.
In my experience, responsible professionals do not give free Internet advice in situations with potentially serious consequences. Serious situations require very carefully considered advice; you could leave something out or misstate something; it could be misconstrued - and someone dies. For much less dire situations, I don't give professional advice without giving it far more care than I give an HN comment.
Authoritative sources are great. They probably bring to bear far more expertise than HN commenters, they've already performed all that careful consideration, and in many cases they've also tested how the information will be understood. Again, misunderstandings can be deadly.
The proper response is not 'here's what to do'; it's 'here's a link to an excellent authoritative source'.
I agree with your general premise. I disagree with your application of that premise here. In this case the comment is providing a warning that the situation is more dangerous than it appears.
Someone reading that comment would be more likely to act conservatively, resulting in fewer deaths.
The internet is not somehow magically unreal, take advice just as your would from any source. Evaluate it, double check it, etc.
In this case the advice is good and worth keeping in mind. There's a reason lifeguards carry floatation aids and it's not just to give a little buoyancy advantage.
> In this case the advice is good and worth keeping in mind
How do you know? You can find a population on the Internet that will tell you almost anything is a good idea, especially groups of people in the same online community. Anti-vaxxers come to mind.
I can't speak for him but in my case I know that advice is good because it's an accurate summary of what I was taught in a Red Cross certification course. I can't prove that to you so your epistemological objection still stands, but if you're actually curious you can download the American Red Cross lifeguard manual here: https://www.redcross.org/take-a-class/lifeguarding/lifeguard...
Reading that manual is not a substitute for actual lifeguard training, but I expect you'll find it supports the general points made above.
Specifically pages 161 and 198 confirm the advice "If they get hold of you, DIVE so they let go." In my personal opinion that's the most important advice in that comment since failing to free oneself from a drowning victim is the cause of many multiple-drownings. The Red Cross goes into specifics on how exactly you do it, and when you're receiving training you practice doing it with the other students or instructors, but that short summary is an accurate summary.
Because it's a subject I have knowledge of and the given information is an accurate summary of some of that knowledge?
Facts aren't just floating out there in the aether, many of them are testable. There are also people on the internet who well tell you that vaccinations are helpful. Oh my gosh, how do you even know the truth on this crazy contraption? It's shocking that this problem of determining truth is entirely and wholly isolated to this one communications medium and no others isn't it?
I guess you could always just wait for something on television to tell you the absolute truth.
I think it is very important to let everyone know what a drowning person looks like so that when they see one, they can scream for help from a professional.
And yes, I am a trained life guard, though it was a long time ago.
Problem is, a lot of non-experts give very, very bad advice very confidently. A layperson has no idea if someone on the internet is actually an expert giving good advice or is just spouting nonsense.
What’s even more dangerous is that children can get secondary drowning if they sucked water into their lung [0]. They would often just look like they’re tired, like any other child after the beach. But it can be fatal if not treated properly.
Also, most people don’t know how to swim. When you ask a person if they know how to swim, when you’re headed to the beach, you’ll get:
1 Sometimes: no way, I stay out of the water
2 Usually: uh, sure, yup, I can swim
3 Rarely: Totally, I used to be on a team.
My favorite follow up to #2 is “could you swim 4 laps in a pool without ever touching the bottom or stopping to take a break? That usually prompts a “what are you crazy, no way that’s super hard” response. Then I inform the person that they do not know how to swim, and that they should be extra careful.
Relatively few people who've not been on a competitive team have ever taken enough swimming lessons to be good for a few brisk laps of the pool. Where I come from every school child gets probably 20 hours or so of swim lessons in public school, spread out over several years. In my experience this sort of background is typically enough to be able to tread water and move around, but not with correct form. And without correct form they will quickly fatigue.
It's certainly possible for a autodidact swimmer with such a background to go to the Y pool and start doing laps until they figure out out on their own, but that's pretty uncommon. And it's also possible for somebody to pay for enough private lessons to become a competent swimmer, but that's also fairly uncommon. In my experience every licensed lifeguard I've ever met was currently or formerly a competitive swimmer; that's not a requirement but realistically only competitive swimmers could accomplish the 300 yard perquisite swim required to qualify you to receive training. (As for selection bias, in my training course there were several without competitive swimming backgrounds who tried, but failed.)
(In some outlying situations, perhaps such as a coastal community where surfing is common, the above might not necessarily be true. But for your typical community I'd say it's a good bet that anybody who hasn't swam competitively will, if they're able to swim at all, have poor form and fatigue quickly.)
Yes this is in the US. The school district owned one pool. A few years of your 12 years in the school district system, students would get a week or two of lessons during gym class (being bused to the pool from the other schools in the district, when necessary.) About an hour of lessons 2-3 times a week for one or two weeks, a handful of times in twelve years. On second thought 20 hours may have been an underestimate, but not by much.
That same pool is also where private swimming lessons for all ages were available for a modest fee (that program was subsidized by the pool's existence but otherwise self-funding. I worked as an instructor in that program for a few years and got a modest paycheck for it.) That pool was also use for practice and meets for the swim club (competitive swimming for young children) and the swim team (competitive swimming for teenagers.) Private lessons were mostly attended by young children, their parents stopped paying for it once they were reasonably confident their child wouldn't drown and it was very rare for anybody as old as a teenager to take those lessons. The pool was also open to the public once or twice a week for a dollar or two and there was a lane set aside for lap swimming, but it was rarely used.
I'm not sure what the bottleneck was that prevented more school-hour swimming lessons during their scheduled gym classes. It may have been the busing requirement, since there were a handful of elementary schools in the district that were not close to the school building that had the pool.
While I agree it is better in the Australia, it can't be that uncommon. I am Australian but would struggle to swim 100m.
I have always been a pretty poor swimmer by local standards. But that is not because others did any more lessons in school than I did (those lessons were quite limited).
Some might have had more private lessons than me; but I think the main difference is that they bedded down what they had learned in lessons doing recreational swimming. Which I is common in Australia, but rare where my family comes from.
Not really. It's more of a sign that the person knows how to swim efficiently, which I suspect is inversely related to risk of drowning.
Case in point: go to a public swimming pool (YMCA, etc.) when old people are swimming laps. You'll see people who are clearly not athletic swim for many tens of minutes without taking a break.
I’d say that’s a segment of the population who can swim.
But outside those who swam on a team for more than a year (I was a competitive swimmers for more than a decade), and of course lifeguarded through my high school years, I’ve found it very rare for people who have less than a few hundred hours experience in a pool (in a non-play way) to understand their safety limits.
I'm willing to say that outright. In my experience as a very aquatic person ie water polo/swimming/surfing most civilians have nooooo clue how to swim. They know how to not immediately drown... But that's about it. Your typical surfer is also a good swimmer and comfortable in the water. So the people who can actually swim are 1. Competitive swimmers 2. Surfers
My adult swimming standards are going to be 1. Can you swim 1 mile open water 2. Do you know what to do in a rip tide
#4 I grew up in ISLAND_NAME and went to the beach all the time.
At least that's my answer, but I do have to say if you're not physically fit you may not want to go too far out to sea. Swimming is fun but also a form of exercise too and will tire you out.
It really doesn't matter, anyone who knows how to swim should be able to accomplish this with ease. Notice how he's not setting any sort of time limit.
Both of those are excessive "can you swim" questions. US scouts standard for "Swimmer" is
Jump feet first into water over the head, level off, and begin swimming.
Swim 75 yards in a strong manner using one or more of the following strokes: sidestroke, breaststroke, trudgen, or crawl; then swim 25 yards using an easy resting backstroke.
The 100 yards must be completed without stops and must include at least one sharp turn.
Rest by floating…Long enough to demonstrate ability to rest when exhausted.
Respectfully, those standards are crap. I'm from Iceland, and just looking up the swimming standards all 15 year olds have to pass and which I and everyone in the country had to pass as part of secondary school:
1) Swim 600 meters in under 20 minutes without stopping or touching the bottom.
2) Perform a rescue swim of 15 meters with a peer without stopping or touching the bottom.
3) Dive for 15 meters.
Those US scout standards are something Nordic countries might subject 6 or 7 year olds to.
The context of this thread is asking an able-bodied adult if they can swim before going to the beach. As in swimming in the ocean, an uncontrolled environment where there's waves and currents.
An able-bodied adult that actually knows how to swim should be able to swim for at least several kilometers in the open ocean without drowning or dying from exhaustion, assuming Mediterranean temperatures and waves that aren't higher than 1-2 meters.
He almost certainly means 15 meters horizontally. Besides most hobby free divers not going to 15 meters very often, I'd wager 15+ meter deep pools are pretty uncommon even in Iceland.
At least when I was a scout (~6 years ago now, Eagle) those were the standards you had to meet to swim in a pool/lake where you couldn't stand. But there was still significant monitoring of swimmers - lifeguards plus a buddy system where every 5-10 minutes you'd have a "buddy check" where you had to join hands with your buddy and hold them up out of the water while they counted the number of pairs.
The requirements for the Swimming Merit Badge aren't all that much better, though.
>"The requirements for the Swimming Merit Badge aren't all that much better, though."
As I recall the "lifesaving" merit badge at least requires 400 yards without stopping, which is a lot more reasonable. If it were up to me that'd be the standard swimming test, but I suppose they want an accessible "skill ramp".
There's an excellent episode on stuff you should know podcast about drowning. They talked about this and several other interesting facts about drowning.
In the context of the article "drowning doesn't look like drowning". Drowning a week after you have been submerged in water doesn't "look like drowning". The definition may not be medically accepted but the concept is well documented.
From the original article.
Dry drowning occurs when, after being submerged in water, a person's vocal cords experience a spasm and close, making it difficult to breathe, said Dr. Mike Patrick, an emergency-medicine physician at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, who was not involved in the boy's care. When this happens, the body's response is to send fluid to the lungs to try to open up the vocal cords. But this can lead to excess fluid in the lungs — a condition called pulmonary edema. Symptoms of dry drowning usually start within an hour after a person is submerged in water, Patrick said.
Was a junior lifeguard a long time ago at university pool, not sure if they still do this but do lifeguards still have flotation device and go into kicking position when approaching drowning people?
I don't know how to swim and have almost drowned a few times (~8) from not really respecting that I can't swim effectively (actually from reading the top link from ColinWright I am tempted to do a "AskHN: Best way to learn how to swim as an adult?" there seems to be a lot of knowledge here on this subject)
One of those times was particularly bad and someone had to come in and rescue me. I had gone to a swimming pool the day before and done a couple of strokes and thought to myself "this isn't too bad" but then we went to this cliff next to a flooded canyon where people like to jump into the water (it's very deep but only around 10 meters across and you have to swim across to get to the cliff). I wanted to be safe so I started by going parallel to the bank to be sure I could do it but after doing a stroke and keeping my head out of water I thought "what the hell I'll go for it" and turned while swimming and started going across. With no experience and a very out of my element I was rushing and basically managed to exhaust myself when I was half way (I could have gotten to that same spot in one kick from the bank probably). It was a very strange feeling I couldn't move at all! My body was completely exhausted and I couldn't summon an ounce of energy so I started to drown. The issue was that no one really took it seriously and my friend who was standing on the other side and had said he'd help me if anything went wrong was just looking at me like "come on.." so gradually my panic rose and rose until my face communicated sufficient terror for him to realize that I was going to die.
The problem of course is when you are really panicked this climbing response (that I just learned about today by reading ColinWrights top link in this thread) kicks in and you become dangerous. I did know that panicking people tend to kill their would-be saviors in their panic but I wasn't really thinking..
Anyway he jumps in and I bear hug him instantly and we both start drowning, except I realize we're going to die and go completely limp just keeping my hand on his shoulder and my eyes open. He manages a stroke or two and then I do the climbing response and pull on his shoulder and manage to grab a rock and pull on it and boom I'm up and standing on the other side wheezing and coughing and with a crazy headache.
It's very important to start saving at first signs of trouble and not waiting for signals of distress, by then people have already lost their rationality. I think what saved me is just how mentally prepared I was for this exact scenario and also having experienced it before but with no one to help me (needing to breath out all air and walk on the bottom of the ocean / pool to find something to grab / float with). Being careful about not breathing in water (better to suffocate) and having done a bunch of yoga was also useful.
My biggest lesson was that swimming isn't binary, anyone can swim, it's more about the gradual efficiency improvements you make. Since then I've made some progress in learning to relax again and now I know how to float on my back but I'd like to buy a buoy for open water swimming and start practicing in the ocean. I'd love it if anyone can inform me of the sanity of that plan or give me good resources and advice.
> [..]bear hug him instantly and we
> both start drowning[..].
For anyone who knows how to swim who's on the other side of this, what I was taught you should do is:
a) Try to find another way to deal with the situation, e.g. throw something that floats at that person, or swim to them with a tree branch, or anything you have at hand. You'll be risking your life approaching them if they're all you can grab.
b) If you're OK with risking your life, you dive, approach them from underwater from the rear, and push them up by the hips long enough that they can breathe or show that they're not panicking. If they are you let them go, swim away, take a breath, and repeat.
c) If somehow they manage to grab a hold of you you dive. Their panic reflex is to try to approach the surface. If you try to also approach the surface they'll try to climb on top of you and they'll likely kill you. It's really hard to get rid of someone clinging to you in the water in panic. Even an 8 year old could kill an adult male under those circumstances.
People who are drowning are in a complete state of panic. If you're close enough to shore you may both be better off if you let them lose consciousness and haul them in unconscious and try to resuscitate them, otherwise you might both die.
My suggestion would be to go and have some lessons. If you have a proper swimming pool nearby there likely Is dome cind of swim school or swimming club and lessons available.
It's good but not perfect since the lifeguard thankfully rescues them before they drown but it's still a good exercise. I can do this exercise fairly reliably but I'm not perfect either.
A few years ago I saved a man from drowning _but_ I very very nearly didn't: https://medium.com/@ideasasylum/i-saved-a-man-from-drowning-...