Joanna Wane pays tribute to the yellow and red army – and a new generation of rookies – who'll be making our beaches safer this summer.
Surf patrols hadn't started for the season at Wainui Beach when word spread like wildfire late last year that Six60 were coming to town.
It was mid-November and the sea off Gisborne's sunshine coast was still witheringly cold, but a dozen volunteer lifeguards had been rustled up to keep an eye on the crowd. The day was a sizzler and around 7000 people arrived at the Wainui Surf Life Saving Club to watch the band play a free gig on the deck. Then everyone headed down for a swim after the show.
Belinda Slement, the club's director of lifeguarding, was keeping watch from the tower — her baby son Ryan strapped into a front pack — when a report came in from the beach. A 9-year-old boy had gone missing and his mother was so distraught she couldn't even remember exactly where she'd parked her car.
Immediately, a grid search was organised, focusing on the main hub around the beach, a white sweep of sand that stretches almost 4km from the Makorori headland to Shark Bay. "The [sea] water was my first concern, and then the creek," says Slement, who describes it as one of her most testing times as a lifeguard.
"Getting the right information out of a parent is difficult, because they're panicked and stressed. And generally when you have a search, the young guards do the whole 'replace head and put cabbage on', running around not knowing what to do.
"Those are the times you have to be calm and go through a methodical process. Otherwise you scatter-search and don't know what ground you've covered."
Also on patrol that day was veteran lifeguard Lyall Evans, the first person the lost boy's mother had approached for help. The beach, known for its strong currents and surf breaks, was swarming with people. As time passed, Evans began fearing the worst. "I was beside myself," he says.
Forty minutes later, they found him — waiting at his mum's car, which was parked a bit further down the beach than where she thought she had left it.
This is the last issue of Canvas for 2020 and, after such a tough year, we all needed a happy ending.
Above-average temperatures are forecast for summer and many Kiwis will soon be packing their bags for the beach, enjoying a freedom denied to much of the world facing winter in the shadow of a resurgent pandemic.
But with overseas holidays still off the table, surf lifeguards around the country are bracing themselves for what could be their busiest season on record. And that makes Slement nervous. "With more numbers on the beach, do we have enough experienced lifeguards to cover patrols? That's what keeps me awake at night," she says.
"Do I have an IRB [inflatable rescue boat] driver? Do I have an experienced patrol captain and some experienced lifeguards? We have lots of young teenagers and it's great if they can get on a paddleboard and help someone, but they don't have the correct decision-making needed for a big rescue."
In the past 10 years, the red and yellow army has rescued more than 11,000 people — saved them from drowning — and assisted thousands more to safety. Since 1910, when official patrols first began, not a single person has drowned while swimming between the flags. Not one.
Yet despite nationwide public safety campaigns, a review by Surf Life Saving NZ shows an upward trend in the number of deaths. New Zealand has one of the highest beach and coastal drowning rates per capita in the OECD, 70 per cent higher than Australia. From 2009 to 2019, a total of 320 fatalities were recorded on our beaches and coastline; the vast majority were male.
A sobering University of Auckland report released in late November found that in 9 per cent of cases where people had gone missing in the water, a body was never recovered. Despite the often-treacherous surf at Auckland's popular west coast beaches, almost half of the 219 drownings that were studied happened on the North Island's east coast. And that puts Wainui right in the danger zone.
Slement grew up directly across the road from the surf club, in the house her parents built on an empty corner section in the small settlement, about 10km from Gisborne, and still live in today. Her mum remembers them walking along the beach to school. The roll at Wainui Beach primary has doubled in size since then and every Friday morning, the Year 6 seniors go surfing.
As a kid, Slement pretty much lived at the club, working her way through the ranks to qualify as an advanced lifeguard. Still in her early 20s, she was first on the scene at an incident that won Surf Life Saving NZ's 2004 Rescue of the Year Award — resuscitating a 3-year-old boy dragged unconscious from a van that had crashed off the road by the Wainui club and landed on its roof in the creek. "When I looked over the bank, all I could see was the base of the van submerged in the water, with the wheels spinning."
As she ran to grab oxygen and a trauma kit from the clubrooms, two male lifeguards and a passer-by somehow managed to roll the two-tonne vehicle back up the right way. Firefighters cut the boy's mother from the wreckage and she recovered in hospital, but his 66-year-old nana died at the scene.
There was no trauma counselling offered back then and for Slement the memory is still just as raw and vivid today. "It was the first time I'd done CPR. The first time I'd seen someone deceased. The first time I'd properly put in practice the skills I'd learnt. I can feel my adrenalin going just talking about it now."
The grandmother's walking stick was recovered from the creek and the family presented it to the club as a symbol of their gratitude.
Slement moved away after studying sport science at university, running a swim school in Napier and later working in Wellington for Swimming NZ. But Wainui was where she wanted to raise a family, and when she came back home five years ago, she and husband Hilton already had a daughter on the way.
Chloe is now one of the youngest members of the junior nippers squad, and Hilton has been recruited as a volunteer coach. ("What do you like about being in the water?" I ask her. "Everything!" she replies.)
She's a tough straight-talker, but Slement gets a bit emotional talking about the surf life saving community at Wainui and how it formed the person she would become. "I never wanted to bring up my kids in a big city like Wellington where they'd get lost," she says. "My childhood was amazing — spending weekends at the club with your friends, learning all the beach skills and the respect that comes from that closeness to the sea. I wanted them to have that, too, and give back to others what's given so much to me."
A brutal southwesterly is whipping the beach into a frenzy on Sunday morning as the first cars pull up to the clubhouse. There are 130 nippers in Wainui's junior surf school and a remarkable number of them have turned out for training in their wetsuits and caps, despite the challenging conditions.
Split into groups by age and experience, they warm up with drills on the sand, then all but the littlest kids plunge into the churning foam. Within minutes, a fierce sideways drift has dragged one group 20m along the beach but they practise riding the current, not fighting against it. Adult coaches move with them through the waves, only an arm's reach away.
Haruru Fukushima, who comes from Tokyo, has three of her children in the water. They're dwarfed by the surf and it's a little nerve-racking to watch sometimes, but she loves the beach almost as much as they do. The ocean, she says, is good for the mind. Her son Mako, who's 11, has just been smashed by a wave, someone tells her. "He came up smiling!"
Gisborne was struggling when Ailsa Cuthbert first moved here in 1998. Not anymore, she says. She works remotely for an asset management company in Vietnam that has a $3 billion portfolio, and global agency Straker Translations has an entire team based in Gisborne, promoting an affordable, family-friendly lifestyle. A mother of two and a volunteer lifeguard, Cuthbert is also on the board of Trust Tairāwhiti, which funds development projects. One recent successful application paid for a new ramp providing disability access to the Wainui club.
Founded in 1937, Wainui was the first surf life saving club established in the Gisborne region. Some locals are fourth-generation members, and the families are close. "A genuine people club," is how lifer Murray Robertson describes it, in a history published to mark the 80th anniversary. "No bulls***."
Now in his late 60s, Robertson has put about 400 youngsters through their surf life saving training, including Slement. In 1988, he was one of the first lifeguards called in when Cyclone Bola pounded the region. He remembers sitting in the smoko room at the Gisborne police station in his wetsuit, eating a hot pie, and not realising how serious the situation was until a report came in that three people were missing after their car was swept away.
Over the next four days, a squad of 60 lifeguards played a key part in the emergency response, using their IRBs to navigate the floodwaters and jumping out of helicopters onto the rooftops of submerged houses to pull people to safety. "I was really proud of our movement that week," says Robertson. "The camaraderie was incredible."
Paid lifeguards run patrols on weekdays through the height of summer, but thousands of volunteers spend their weekends at more than 80 hotspots around the country and make up emergency call- out squads.
Last year, an off-duty lifeguard at Wainui was sitting in his car assessing the surf when he saw a mother and three young children swept out to sea. He rescued all of them, one by one. On surf patrols, though, much of the work is preventive — monitoring the coastline, warning anyone fishing from the rocks, and encouraging swimmers to stay between the flags. Slement has seen people walk straight into rips, oblivious to the danger.
In all the rescues she's done, not a single person has raised their hand to call for help, "They panic and try to swim back to shore, because that's the survival instinct kicking in. The ones in real trouble are 'climbing the ladder', trying to keep their head above water. They start coughing and all of a sudden a wave is coming and they don't have time to take a proper breath. That's how it unfolds really quickly."
Wainui Beach has plenty of rips and holes, but the conditions are much more consistent than on Auckland's west coast, where the threats are constantly changing.
A few years back, Bethells Beach/Te Hēnga lifeguard Mike Chan Foung was resting on the sand after an ocean swim when someone spotted a rookie in trouble. It was only when the rescue boat drew close that he realised it was his 13-year-old son Elijah.
"The surf was the west coast at its finest, pretty messy and ugly," says Chan Foung, who suspects Elijah was caught in a flash rip. "He was doing all the right things; he had his hand up and he wasn't panicking. But I could see the distress on his face. We scooped him up and as soon as we got him into the boat, I wasn't going to let him go. It was quite emotional.
"Afterwards, we talked it through. What he did right. What he could do better. It was a good reminder that you can never take this place for granted and underestimate the power of the water."
A police officer in his day job, Chan Foung is the district Pacific co-ordinator for Waitemata. Some of those crossover skills have proved useful, especially when it comes to defusing a potentially volatile situation where alcohol is mixed with a long day in the sun.
His wife and their three kids live close to the beach and all of them are involved in the surf club, bringing friends and extended family with them into the community. Both Pasifika and Māori are significantly over-represented in the drowning statistics, so that makes it personal.
"Culturally, the sea has been a source of food, not a sport," says Chan Foung, who is Samoan, Tokelauan and Chinese. "Many of the families who come here aren't accustomed to using the water that way."
In May, the Government's 2020 Budget committed $9.4 million a year to the cost of surf life saving operations, providing a pipeline of state funding for the first time. It's seen as a game-changer for the volunteer movement. Reliant on sponsorship and public donations, it was struggling financially even before Covid-19 put on the squeeze.
Lyall Evans, whose accountancy skills have been just as handy for Wainui as his lifeguard training, reckons he's never seen the local surf clubs in such good shape. Say what you like about the young generation, but he's impressed by the new wave of recruits, who are far more dedicated and respectful than back in his day.
"There's a level of professionalism in how you act," says Slement. "When you put on that red and yellow, you're elevated straight away to role models who are going to save people's lives."