For the few surfers hard up enough to paddle out in the knee-high dribblers at VB’s First Street Jetty early on February 17, it was a session they won’t soon forget. At just after 6 am, one of the surfers noticed a body floating in the lineup and dragged it to shore. Police determined that it was the body of a 30-year-old VB resident. They are calling the death “suspicious” but have not released any further information.
I know this is kinda gross but has anyone else had experiences like this?
I’ve found two…
One embedded in the kelp bed at Scott’s Creek, maybe 2 days old.
One floating just offshore at Montara, definetely over a week old.
You go early, you avoid crowds, that’s what you find sometimes.
This is similar or at least water related. The frozen kind. My brother in law is a ski patrolman at Squaw Valley and has found 3 bodies over the past twenty years. Two have suffocated in tree wells and he was the first to find them. Swears he will NEVER go on another recovery mission for the rest of his life.
In High School a friend of mine found a 11 Year old kid who has succumb to hypothermia in November just south of St Augustine Florida. Not a good Idea to learn how to surf while alone. What’s worse, my friend later spent over two hours helping to push the emergency vehicles out of the sand when they got stuck.
Spoons
I was swimming after my board at Indicators (Santa Cruz) back in the early 70’s and found a fisherman wedged in the rip rap. The Coast Guard had been looking for him for a week after he went overboard. Kind of hard to see what the lump was until I was right on top of him. Seagulls, fish and whatnot had pretty much feasted on the exposed parts…hard to sleep for a few weeks after that.
I went out to the west coast of the island about 2 weeks after a very large storm. The tide was high so I had to walk aways along the driftwood in order to get to my favourite sandbar. While crossing a creek I noticed a smell not unlike spawned out salmon (but wrong season). Over the next log I found a bull stellar sea lion very bloated, very green and very gross. Over the next 400 meters of coast I found at least a half dozen more, all victims of the storm. Doesn’t have the same emotional impact of finding a human, but still very disgusting to find 2000lbs of rotting blubber.
no…but i saw a guy on crack aim and throw his head under the wheel of the truck just in front of me once… I was headed to Thanksgiving chow in 1991…thought i’d never be able to eat again… saw the guys brain sliding like an egg yolk (it was white) across the pavment… as I drove around the body i saw his head looked like a rug almost flat on the pavement…4 hours later i was chowing on turkey, stuffin, cranberry jelly, etc no problem
mid 90’s one early morning at Ob in san fran, walked down one of the stair cases in the middle of the beach to find a guy hunched over infront of the sea wall, the wall was splattered with blood, the guy had been shot during the night. some other guy had already called the cops so we just checked it out for a few mins and then continued to the surf…
Ah…yeaaah…think I’m gonna skip the all-you-can-eat spahgetti dinner special tonight…
Me and my mates have rocked up to the beach early early in the morning, and there was , what looked like this homeless guy, just sleeping on the beach further up…
So we just went for a surf. Time passes and more people come, eventually it becomes clear and it turns out the guy was dead. Have no more info except a photo we took when the police etc got there:
1985 Summer SD Fire / Lifeguards, pulling bloated bodies out of the water via boat. About 2± per season, best to use a net. If you grab an arm, thats all you get. My god the fricking smell, never get used to it. Funny old guy tenure thing: Let the rookie get the floater,…“hey just grab the arm and pull it in”.
During the mid-'70s I was a fireman.
Something over 50,000 people in the US manage to kill themselves in cars every year. And when a couple of tons of steel with soft meat aboard meet up with the same thing, well, the meat loses.
I remember one, two drunks pulled out of a bar…right in front of some poor kid coming home from working late. Unusually, the drunks were the ones that became meat and the kid was unscratched, but what he had to carry with him the rest of his days…
doc…
I’ve come up on 3.
2 in the mid and late 70’s at my homebreaks at Sunset Cliffs while surfing with friends. Both were Navy personel blown off decks of ships. Second one was real bad. Bloated, with clothing stretched tight, had skin in places but mostly just the stark white fat layer (?) showing. Couldn’t shake the smell for a long while.
The third was pretty sad, a tourist from Europe stepped off the edge of a reef into about 10 feet of water in the sand bottom channel. Not much current that day. Still, he sank. He was foaming out the mouth and nose by the time we got him on the beach, blue lips. He didn’t make it.
Managed to save 4 people though. 2 in Mexico, 1 in Hawaii and 1 at home. My buddy has one of the Mexico haul-ins on video. A fat non-surfer kid, that I put on my board and let him belly ride in. He was so stoked (I think on the ride!!!) His family was freaking on the beach. (The Dad kept offering a reward (ha ha!) I couldn’t accept anything but handshakes). Actually just letting us surf the place was appreciated by us. As surfers we are usually on it before the Lifeguards (unless the beach is patrolled). One of my best friends is a Lifeguard and just laughs at the vid. He pulls in people all summer long!
Oh yeah, in the late 80’s we watched a plane crash into the water, he was one of those guys who tow the signs. His cabin caught fire so he cut loose the sign and splashed-in about 100 yards over from the surfers. What a helpless feeling seeing that plane. Luckily, the old guy crawled out the top of the wing hatch and stood there while the top of the wing just broke the surface. He stood there scratching his head, pretty classic…
As a whitewater guide, I pulled 3 out of rivers. 2 looked like one until we cut 'em loose…thought a rope tied around their feet would keep them near their (Sevylor) raft … until the raft flipped and went left around a rock & they went right. Water pressure held them there long enough that the 3rd person in their (one person) boat made it to shore. No idea how long she was there screaming. We did CPR until the FD showed up, not because it would do anything for them, but for her.
The other was long gone, but well preserved by mountain water.
More vivid than that was doing chest compressions as a brand-new EMT in Pueblo, CO, feeling the ribs snap, on a guy who was so dead the Dr. on duty thought he’d be good practice for us newbies…
A few years later, I was first on scene when a motorcyclist hit an F350 head-on. As doc said, the meat loses.
Last year, a truck belonging to a friend’s company took out 6 cars. 3 fatalities. He knew it was bad and called me, knowing I was close & would figure out a way to get there, and I went. The driver was in shock, a mom & her 12 year old in their minivan were decapitated by the truck’s trailer, and I was kind of pinned, trying to explain that I knew who’s truck it was. I’ll never forget that. Much worse than any of the others, especially since my wife & kids ride around in the same model minivan.
I told my wife, never drive along right next to a tractor-trailer. The height is just wrong.
It all sucks, but, at the same time, better them than me. Crass, maybe. Insensitive, yes. Unfortunate, for certain. But also true. And important to keep in mind if you want to go on sleeping.
Damn this thread is Groooooss.
I was out Ospray’s at Sunset cliffs and this dude blew his brains out just as the sun was setting. I was just paddling in few yards from where he landed… I know that there are few more but I try not to remember them.
Shippy,
That reminds me of that 70’s disco song, “It’s Raining Men”
-That waz sick
They found my Dad when I was 16. I was the only one who could stand to identify the body. It had been cruising the bottom between N street and Kelly’sCove for 9 weeks.
Tragic, was he surfing?
He was stripped bass fishing off CamelBack Rock near Sutros at 10 at night, as were 7 other’s, and a few at the various rocks N of the CliffHouse. Prolly was pushed, those fisherman argued constantly over position, but who really knows…
i have be going out in hurricane surf up until last summer on a bodyboard so i was always in the areas where people would get sucked out on average i would pull 1-2 a year, always alive. It was always funny an 8 yearold kid pulling in 150lb man on his bodyboard before the gaurds were even in the water. Now i am a lifeguard. sterotypical jersey one time i did find a NYC police department bodybag. I think everyone should write their local and state governments saying the surfers are often pirst reponders in situations with heavy surf(this of course is relative to your area) and black ball regulations should be lifted when the surf or ocean conditions are"dangerous".