smoke 'em if you got 'em

Surfer's smoke break saves pinned woman

The Vancouver Sun

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

By Gerry Bellett

When it began it had the feel of a TV beer ad -- four pals having a good time in a beach-front condo after a wild weekend surfing in the breakers off Long Beach.

It was last Sunday, the music was playing, the beer flowing and the jokes were flying when one of the party -- Jason Usher, 30 -- stepped out to the patio for a smoke. It was about 8:30 p.m.

Four hundred yards away in the darkness and the surf of Tofino's Cox Beach, a woman would have died had he not chosen that moment to light up.

"I guess for once having a smoke saved a life," Usher said Tuesday.

What happened next was remarkable.

"I heard some sort of commotion coming from the beach. There's always lots of noise coming from down there and the wind was really blowing and the surf was crashing, but I heard a faint cry, so I yelled as loud as I could, 'Do you need help' and someone cried back, 'Yes.'"

Usher who manages the Cactus Club Restaurant in Kelowna was with restaurant owner Andrew Latchford, chef Andrew Freeman and Corey Wittig, a corporate chef who works in Vancouver's Cactus Club on Broadway and Ash.

All big, burly 30 year olds -- Usher is seven feet tall -- this was their final night at the Pacific Sands Beach Resort in Tofino where they had spent two days surfing the large rollers coming ashore from offshore storms.

After a day in the surf, they were snug inside their condo dressed only in shorts, T-shirts and flip-flops.

One of them grabbed a flashlight, but without changing into warmer clothes they ran through the brush and the trees towards the ocean -- Usher being the only one to put on surfing boots.

"At first I thought someone's been sucked off the beach by the surf and we might have to go in and get them out," said Usher. "We knew we didn't have time to change into something warm."

It was pitch black, raining, freezing cold, with the wind howling off the water.

Latchford said they could see a torch shining in the distance by the surf line and they ran as fast as they could, but it took them at least a minute to reach the light.

What they found stunned them.

"There was a couple, I don't know if they were in their 50s or 60s, but they'd been sitting on a log, I think with their backs to the sea," Latchford said.

"A big, rogue wave had come in and knocked them off the log. They never saw it coming. It picked the log up and rolled it on the woman and she was pinned underneath and couldn't get out. Her husband had injured his leg and was in a bit of a daze and was unable to help her," he said.

Usher estimated the log was about 20 feet long and more than three feet in diameter, completely waterlogged, and the four friends heaved but couldn't budge it.

"It was a huge log it must have weighed 8,000 pounds. It had rolled over her legs and was up to her hips," he said.

Latchford said the woman was in shock and unable to breathe properly.

"She couldn't move, the tide was coming in and burying her face. We were scared the log would be rolled on to her chest and crush her so we kept trying to hold it back," said Latchford.

The way the tide was rising, Latchford figured they had no more than 10 minutes before she would have been completely under water.

"She was not moving and I think she had a crushed pelvis," Latchford said.

Realizing that they would never move the log and that they only had minutes to get her out, Usher and Latchford knelt in the water beside her and began frantically digging in the sand with their bare hands while Wittig held her head out of the water.

Freeman called 911 on his cellphone, then began digging.

"The tide was rising and I guess you could say there was some real solid digging going on," said Usher.

"The water was frigid and we were worried, too, about her getting hypothermia, although the big thing was to get her out," he said.

More help began arriving and Freeman told one hotel guest to go back and bring a garden hose in case the woman's head became covered by the tide while they were trying to release her.

"Considering how stressed out we all were at the time, that was a brilliant idea from Andrew to help her breathe," Usher said.

After the arrival of other people they made one last effort to lift the log but couldn't move it.

They went back to digging and when they'd dug a large enough hole under her legs and back they pulled the woman free.

Using Usher's 11-foot surfboard as a stretcher, they carried the woman up the beach to the hotel's parking lot, where she was placed in an ambulance and taken to Victoria.

Latchford doesn't know the name of the couple who are believed to be from Miami, Manitoba.

"The last we saw of them they were in the ambulance and we just hope the lady wasn't too badly hurt," he said Tuesday.

What did they do then?

"Went back to the cabin and had a beer."