Rescue Group Teaches Water Safety Course in Port

Beachgoers heading to the shores in Port Washington this year will notice some manmade additions to the landscape — mainly educational signs and safety life rings — and residents are also invited to attend water safety seminars to prep themselves for a day of swimming.

"Water safety is something that everyone should know, and we often take it for granted," said Dave Benjamin, executive director of the Great Lakes Surf Rescue Project. "Accidents can happen anywhere … a lot of times people go to the beach like it's a big park, and they don't realize that there's a lot of big currents that can happen on the lake, and the conditions can change really fast."

The Great Lakes Surf Rescue Project — comprised of "Great Lakes surfers dedicated to reducing drowning incidents on the Great Lakes," according to the organization's website — will give a presentation the public at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday at the Thomas Jefferson Middle School pool. The event is open to the public.

The presentation is part of the Week of the Young, hosted by the Kiwanis Club of Greater Port Washington, and also stems from efforts by the Port Washington Waterfront Safety Advisory Committee that formed in light of 15-year-old Tyler Buczek's drowning death. 

Port resident Becky Perez led the sub-committee that focused its attention on educational opportunities for the community. She got in touch with Great Lakes Surf Rescue Project in late fall 2012, and she has been in ongoing contact with the group ever since.

• Related: Patch spoke with the Great Lakes Surf Rescue Project in September. Learn more about the methods the program teaches.

Benjamin advocates a method to help people survive being trapped in currents known as "Flip, Float and Follow." His website describes the three steps of the strategy as:  

• Flip over onto your back.
• Float to keep your head above water, conserve your energy, and to calm yourself down.
• Follow the current until it weakens. Most currents dissipate quickly as they move away from the shore into deeper water. Ride it out, figure out which direction the water is flowing and swim perpendicular to the current toward shore. 

"When someone gets sucked out in a rip current ... the first 10 seconds of being in a rip current is — they're either going to make the biggest mistake of their life, or they're going to flip and float and calm themselves down," Benjamin told Patch in September. "Ask anybody, anywhere — what do you do if you catch on fire … they’ll say 'Stop, Drop and Roll'.  … Ask anybody caught in a rip current what they would do … they either don’t know, or they say don't panic and swim parallel."