Free Shark Trouble by Peter Benchley Page B

lifeguards assigned to the beach were not scheduled to begin their shift for another hour, the youngsters were accompanied by an adult, an uncle, who was reportedly aware of the dangerous currents off this particular stretch of beach. He warned the children not to go into the water while he busied himself preparing fishing rods and fetching food for their picnic.
    The children probably thought they were obeying; wading wasn’t really going into the water.
    Within minutes, three of them were dead.
    While the uncle’s attention was elsewhere, all four had been yanked off their feet by the waves, and grabbed and dragged under water by a current so violent that it had already earned the area its local nickname—“the death trap.” Only one of the children, the eleven-year-old boy, managed somehow to escape the grip of the current and get back to shore.
    The next day’s newspapers were replete with warnings against swimming on unguarded beaches, and official warnings about the price the public pays for ignoring regulations.
    The pertinent issue, however—the real reason those three girls and more than four thousand other people in the United States drowned in 2001—has nothing to do with rules, regulations, or lifeguards.
    It has to do with the public’s unfamiliarity with the ocean and ignorance about swimming safely in it.
    According to the American Red Cross, more than 54 percent of Americans—perhaps as many as 140 million people—say that their primary leisure activity is swimming. That’s more than all our golfers, tennis players, sailors, scuba divers, and Frisbee artists combined. Off the record, though, those same Red Cross officials acknowledge that only about 12 percent of the professed swimmers are actually competent swimmers.
    And God only knows what tiny fraction of that 12 percent are competent
ocean
swimmers, a specialty that takes as much knowledge, training, and experience as rock climbing or kayaking. A Red Cross–certified beginning swimmer is about as close to a skilled ocean swimmer as a licensed driver is to an Indianapolis 500 contestant.
    The United States has 12,383 miles of shoreline, of which much less than 1 percent is patrolled by lifeguards on any given day. So if, on a hot summer day, you’re struck by a sudden urge to swim in the sea, the odds are that there won’t be a lifeguard nearby to keep an eye on you.
    I began to swim in the ocean at the age of five, shepherded diligently by an uncle who had been disqualified from serving in the armed forces during World War II because of a bad back. Swimming in the sea was his passion and his therapy, and because there were no lifeguards on most of the beaches on Nantucket, he wanted me to know how to take care of myself.
    He taught me how to study the water before I went in, how to enter the water without getting bashed by a wave, how to select the wave appropriate for me to ride, how to ride it and recover from the inevitable mistakes I was bound to make. He taught me that swimming in the ocean meant working
with
the ocean, never against it.
    My uncle’s first, indelible lesson, writ large, was:
Never fight the ocean. Go with it and it will work with you. Let it take you where it will, and it will let you go.
    It’s the most important single dictum in ocean swimming. If everyone who swam in the ocean obeyed it, the number of drownings would shrink dramatically.
    People who get into trouble in the ocean are prone to panic. If the past is any guide, somewhere between twenty and forty people
a day
will drown during the summer in the United States, most of them within fifteen feet of safety, and all because of panic.
    If you are a young, healthy, sober person, there is no reason for you to drown while swimming in the ocean if, before you go into the water, you learn the basic facts about the environment into which you’re about to go, learn how to coexist with it and cope with its