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Diver Shane Cooper was one of many volunteers and first responders who tried to rescue 15-year-old Prestyn Smith at Gulfstream Park. Photos by Jerry Lower/The Coastal Star

Family beach outing turns deadly for teen; unpredictable surf kills five in county

By John Pacenti

Sherry and Glen Smith exchanged vows at the beach at sunrise and for the last eight years took their children to greet the day at Gulfstream Park. It was a weekly tradition for the Lake Worth Beach family.

So Sherry Smith took the four children to the beach as usual on Sunday, Nov. 10, with her husband to join the family a bit later in the morning. Then everything inexplicably changed.

“It happened so fast,” Sherry Smith said.

The eldest of the children, Prestyn, disappeared in the surf. The 15-year-old who liked to build computers, who easily picked up his dad’s carpentry skills, a budding artist, a young man who never complained about doing his chores — he was one of five drowning victims in Palm Beach County’s coastal waters in November.

As her two oldest boys played in the surf, Sherry Smith sat with her 13-year-old daughter around 7 a.m.

“My daughter says to look, there’s some jellyfish or something. And so I turn around to take a picture of it. I looked back at my sons and I didn’t see Prestyn’s head. So I run and I jump to go get him. And that was pretty much how it happened.”

The ocean, which for so many is such a blessing in South Florida, takes lives every year through rip currents. It takes and it takes.

About 100 people drown from rip currents along U.S. beaches each year, according to the United States Lifesaving Association. More than 80% of beach rescues annually involve rip currents.

The deadly month started at a Singer Island beach on Nov. 2 when a 64-year-old man drowned.

The next day Maximilian Sadowski, 34, of Lake Worth Beach drowned near the Boynton Inlet. Experts say inlets, piers, jetties, and even rock croppings are notorious for rip currents.

The third was Gerald W. Julian, 50, a Canadian resident of Niagara Falls, Ontario. He took a swim on Nov. 6 in Ocean Ridge near the Colonial Ridge Club with a friend.

“The wives were at the pool, and I guess the two men decided to go down to the ocean.

“It was as rough as can be,” Ocean Ridge Police Chief Scott McClure said. “The rip current got to one and his friend lost him.”

Another drowning occurred the very same day that Prestyn perished — a 55-year-old New York man vacationing with his fiancée at Tideline Palm Beach Ocean Resort. Rip current warnings were posted for the Palm Beach County coast later that day.

Two volunteer divers, Ocean Ridge police and Palm Beach County sheriff’s deputies convene on the beach at Gulfstream Park, where a teenager drowned Nov. 10. Gulf Stream police and Boynton Beach fire rescue personnel also were involved in the search and rescue.

Exhaustion and panic
Sherry Smith dove into the water where she last saw her son next to his 11-year-old brother. Soon she found herself in the same predicament.

“At this point, even though they’re rescuing me, I’m screaming, ‘Get my son. Get my son.’ And they’re trying to calm me down,” she said. “I’ve never been in any water like that. That’s my first time dealing with that.”

Gulf Stream Police Sgt. Bernard O’Donnell, searching for Prestyn, broke the news to the family.

“The officer that pulled me out, they got him out, and he’s out and he’s sitting on the sand, and he’s like losing it. He’s crying, and he’s saying, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,’” Sherry Smith recalled. “And I’m like, ‘Did you see my son?’ And he’s like, ‘Yes, I saw your son, and I’m so sorry.’”

Related: What it’s like being caught by a panic-inducing rip current

 Rip currents are exactly what they sound like — a tear in the continual wave action coming ashore. Waves create a sandbar that eventually gives way — often no wider than 10 feet. This creates a river flowing out to the sea, like uncorking the ocean, said Robert Molleda, meteorologist-in-charge of the National Weather Service’s Miami office.

You don’t need to be a lifeguard to spot a rip current. It’s where there suddenly are no waves. You could spill dye on shore and it would simply be sucked out up to eight feet per second.

For the swimmer, often exhaustion sets in, then panic. The solution is to swim parallel to the shore until you’re out of the rip current — but that needs to happen before exhaustion and panic.

“We have rip currents that are usually on breezy to windy days,” Molleda said. “It doesn’t have to be extremely windy. Even a moderate onshore wind like a 15-mile-an-hour could be enough to cause rip currents.”

On Nov. 10 the wind was gusting in Gulf Stream at 20 mph. Yet even as a helicopter searched for Prestyn above the surf, the beaches were packed and people were in the water.

In Florida, rip currents can occur year-round. “Especially on the east coast of Florida where we have that easterly wind,” Molleda said.

In June, six people drowned in rip currents in two days, including a couple vacationing on Hutchinson Island from Pennsylvania with their six children, and three young men on a Panhandle holiday from Alabama.

Surfers know about rip currents. They are often out on windy days when the surf is rough. But even experienced swimmers can be caught unaware.

“My 15-year-old, his favorite thing is to build sand castles, that’s his thing. He grew up on the beach. I mean, we’ve been going to the beach since I was pregnant with him,” said Sherry Smith.

The question remains with rip current deaths going unabated, can something more be done?

“I’ve beat myself up over the last 10 to 12 years that I’ve worked on the coast, trying to figure out how we could potentially warn people of these dangers,” Gulf Stream Police Chief Richard Jones said.

“Unfortunately I think some people don’t take the conditions of the ocean seriously and they don’t realize the dangers that lurk beneath the surface of the water.”

Billy Blackman, an avid surfer who lives near Gulfstream Park, spent hours on his paddleboard looking for and eventually helping to recover the 15-year-old who had drowned. He was one of many volunteers who helped in the effort.

Look for lifeguards
He said the solution is always to swim at a beach where there is a lifeguard and keep abreast of public warnings. Sound advice, but why has it proved so impractical?

One reason could be that invincibility is hard-wired into the human psyche. No other animal finds a way to put itself intentionally in harm’s way.

Ocean Ridge Mayor Geoff Pugh said when he was a teenager he and his friends would snorkel the Boynton Inlet, where the spearfishing was unparalleled back then. Yet, the sheriff’s deputy not once but twice had to run them out of the dangerous inlet water — the second time he went out in his boat to get them.

“He takes the boat all the way down to the Lake Worth Pier, and he drops us off and just goes, ‘Now walk back and if I catch you again I’m going to throw you in jail,’’’ Pugh said.

Another reason that the messaging could be failing is that a lot of beaches — emphasis on a lot — do not have lifeguards.

“There’s hundreds of miles of beach in Florida and there’s a lot of condos and what, and they’re basically private accesses to the beach,” said Tom Mahady, ocean rescue chief for the city of Boynton Beach.

It is not unusual for a sunbather to start at a guarded beach only to walk down to one in front of a condo and find trouble where there is no lifeguard within a football field, he said.

The signs at the main entrance to the beach at Gulfstream Park offer a barrage of information for visitors.

Palm Beach County’s beach lifeguards arrive at 7:30 a.m. and do training and daily preparations before manning their towers at 9 a.m. It’s during those preparations that they will post if necessary a red-flag warning, meaning dangerous conditions.

“I came to understand this was the third incident in one week that we had no knowledge of,” Sherry Smith said. “If they would put out flags before they open the gate that would be the easiest and quickest fix.”

Glen Smith said he thinks the park shouldn’t have been open with conditions persistent the previous week.

“We’re thinking the gates are open, it’s safe, you know. And there’s no flags, there’s no signs that said don’t go in the water,” he said. “You’re assuming that it is safe to go in. So my thing is, if the water is not safe, just don’t open the gate and let people in.”

The guru of rip currents is Dr. Gregory Dusek, a senior scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Ocean Service in Washington. He said technology may be key to finally putting a dent in the rip current fatalities.

The idea is to use artificial intelligence to detect rip currents by either their visual appearance — dark gaps in the breaking waves — or by tracking how water moves in videos on the surface.

“We can use these detections to potentially help monitor hazardous conditions in real time, as well as improve our NOAA rip current model to provide even better rip current predictions,” Dusek said.

Sherry Smith wants the public to take heed but also wants them to know her son was so much more than another drowning fatality.

“He was the kind of soul you’d call too good to be true,” Sherry Smith said at her son’s Celebration of Life in Lake Worth Beach on Nov. 18. “Such souls often don’t stay with us for long.”

Steve Plunkett contributed to this story.

The ocean’s pull

Rip currents, rip tides and undertow may be used interchangeably, but they are different phenomena. They can all be deadly.

Undertow — Especially dangerous to small children, the undertow is created by big waves breaking on the beach, generating a large uprush and backwash of water and sand. Waders can feel like they are being sucked underwater when the wave breaks overhead. The pull, however, goes only as far as the next breaking wave. Time your escape between waves.

Rip tide — A powerful current caused by low tide pulling water through an inlet along a barrier beach. Rip tides can also occur in bays and lagoons. Swimmers should avoid inlets and the waters around them as these powerful tidal jets carry large amounts of sand. A bather’s best bet is to wave for help from boaters.

Rip currents — Powerful, concentrated channels of water moving quickly from shore. They are prevalent around inlets and other structures that jut out into the water, such as piers and rock croppings. Generally 10 feet wide, they can be difficult to escape as the ocean runs through the channel. Don’t fight the current; swim parallel until you are out of the ocean’s pull.

Source: State University of New York