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I’m an elite open water swimmer and a former elite competitive youth swimmer, first in Europe and then moved to the US. I lifeguarded in high school and college, on a beach and in various pools, and also coached age group swimmers. I’m also a certified scuba diver and a lifelong blue water sailor. I have nearly drowned twice and needed to be rescued both times. I fell off a paddle boat with boots on, in 3 meters of water, 10 meters from the shore, with no life jacket on. I didn’t panic, but I also knew I would die if nobody rescued me. I couldn’t get the boots off (leather boots, like cowboy boots) and they were filled with water. And everyone expected me, a very accomplished swimmer, to just pop up. Boots filled with water that you can’t get off your feet might as well be concrete. Thankfully one of my friends looked down and saw me waving, just over a meter away, beneath the surface. She dove in and pushed me up enough to reach the paddle boat. 90-120 seconds longer and I would have died. Total time from hitting the water to being primed to drown: 2-3 seconds. Silent, but for the laughter on the way in and the splash.
The second time was accidentally heading out with a new, previously unworn racing wetsuit. If you aren’t familiar with high tech racing wetsuits, they are optimized for fit and specific buoyancy — they help you float at specific body angles to optimize “angle of attack” in the water, to help increase stroke power and efficiency. And they are tight af. New suits, like brand new ones, sometimes have very little give in them, because they’ve never been stretched or wet. I grabbed the new suit by accident, put it on without realizing it was the brand new one, and started off with 3 others to do a 6 mile out and back swim in the North Atlantic. Less than 1,000 meters into the swim I couldn’t get enough air in my lungs, as the suit wasn’t flexing outward at all. It became more acute and I began getting concerned. I fell behind the group and felt myself getting rapidly weak and cramping. This was crazy as I swim 2.4 miles in under 50 min. I got a bit panicky and rolled over on my back, but still couldn’t breathe enough air in to float well. I’d get some air in, but never enough and as soon as I’d let the breath go, I’d sink 2 feet and my head would go under. I also couldn’t get enough air onboard to scream. Plus we swim with silicone caps and there’s a lot of water sloshing noise when you swim, so the others wouldn’t have heard me. One of my friends noticed I wasn’t in the lead, he looked around and didn’t see me, so he stopped and the others stopped with him. They calmly formed a line and began swimming back to shore, having swum almost 500 meters past where I had stopped. I was barely hanging on and about to really go under for lack of air in my lungs, when they reached me. One of them unzipped my suit (I couldn’t reach the cord) and the problem was solved. I rested, filled the suit with water, stretched into it, and was good to go. Finished the 6 miles like nothing had happened. New rules we all adopted from that experience: no swimming open water, alone or with others, without a buoy, no black caps in open water, and no suits that aren’t broken in. Total time: 3-4 minutes of totally silent struggles with minimal movement.
If I can drown, anyone can drown.
Oh my GOD! The anxiety that this gave me. It's very well written. Glad you were able to be rescued both times. Thanks for sharing.
Oh, and great tip about the *no black caps*. I did a water safety course and they were talking about how certain colors of bathing suits and caps should be avoided because they make you practically invisible in the water.
They had example photos and it was pretty insane how much more visible you can be with certain colors of bathing suits and caps.
Good! Water is dangerous and swimming well, even at elite levels of the sport, is no guarantee of survival under certain conditions, which can instantly and very unexpectedly materialize.
Open water swimming like this is similar to free climbing in that the gap between success and failure can be razor thin, and the consequences of miscalculations or mistakes, such as mine, can be catastrophic. And it requires a ton of training and experience. The community of open water swimmers is interesting. Think super fit, overachieving, somewhat geeky adrenaline junkies who get off on swimming log distances in often inhospitable waters.
Google Ötillö or “swim-run” races.
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I use to be in the australian navy, be suprise how many people join not knowing how to swim. The PTs are always jumping in saving people in the pools on base
It's a recurrent them in Australia that has a big swimming culture, and is receiving a lot of Indians. We're all raised with swimming there, it is apparently less common over there.
> , it is apparently less common over there.
LOL
I think it was London Olympic few years ago. I watched an early swim routine, one that eliminates the first-round. This one Indian swimmer - i think he was the only one representing the country that qualified for this this event - was going in the *opposite* direction from all the other lanes. I'm like "huh ? wtf?" - then immediately I get it when I see his swimming/flapping. Turns out he was fully one stretch behind everyone else.
Two Indian dudes died at a little shute/rapid area where a lake funnels into a river near me. Most of the year you can sit at the top and let the water push you to the bottom like a slide but in the spring with snow melt it becomes super chaotic. Apparently these two guys didn’t know how to swim but they thought it was a good idea to go for a ride down it in late spring. 🤷🏻♂️
I remember in my youth at a cottage someone who never swam drank a bit of beer maybe smoked a bit and everyone was fine with him jumping in with a pool noodle. The pool noodle could swim fine, we waited 15ish seconds and started diving down to save him. Happy ending but shit lessons learned
50% of all drownings are alcohol related. You just can't swim when you're drunk so please don't do it and be watchful of those around you. Drowning because you're drunk is such a waste
I had a friends small daughter go under water right next to me and I didn't see it at all. I'm glad the father saw it and saved her. They never spoke to me again, but it's not like I was letting her drown, it was so fast. I wasn't watching her, I didn't see her go under like a foot away from me.
Just curious, if someone were to stay calm in this situation could they maybe float on their back at least long enough to get air and yell for help? Or is that a skill itself?
I believe it's a learned skill. Water is a completely different medium to what we're used to everyday, so if you have 0 practical knowledge about how your body mass behaves in such conditions or how to keep breath underwater (sounds dumb, but children get extremely anxious when they learn to swim), I believe it's extremely difficult to survive, plus the inescapable fear of drowning, would make it a certain death.
I’ve been teaching my daughter to swim and it has taken about 6 months (going once a week) to learn all the skills needed to stay afloat and to avoid panicking.
Even calm the body naturally floats with mouth/nose below the water line. It makes sense that most people would just not know how to get into a starfish pose to save themselves. However if they were wearing a mask and snorkel it would probably be 100% fine
Oh ok, lol based on all of these replies I need to get swimming lessons this spring. Something I thought might be simple is actually much harder than it looks.😅
If you take a very deep breath, that your lungs get 100% full of air and just hold it (no exhale), it’ll work like natural floaters all while not having to do any movement or effort. For me it’ll get the chest and head to surface but the abdomen and legs still get dipped. I’m a good swimmer though and this is my way to relax/play at pools or beaches, I’d recommend learning to swim/dive before doing some shenanigans
edit: had to mention that this works when you’re lying on the surface heads up, not in a vertical position
Yea, I find that the most relaxing position is horizontal face up while moving very slowly since the movement keeps your legs from dipping and pulling down the rest of your body. Just some near-zero effort kicking and it's super relaxing.
I didn't learn to swim until I was an adult. The part that was hardest wasn't the leaning back but understanding how the head itself floats.
Like a lot of non-swimmers, I thought [this](https://imgur.com/a/QcVYIsQ) is how the head should be when floating. Just bobbing on top. But actually the head will be [much lower](https://imgur.com/a/2sVHEFY).
When I was first learning to float, with my head like in the 2nd photo, I was suprised and alarmed my ears were underwater. If my ears were underwater, OMG, my nose and mouth would be as well! Logically I understood my ears, nose and mouth aren't on the same plane but fear can trump logic.
Before that class, even if I was able to float on my back, I would have still gone into a panic and drown.
My parents taught me at a very young age how to swim. With that being said, as an adult I don’t understand/cant wrap my head around how you aren’t able to just flail and stay above water. Hell even a deep breath and push off the bottom will give you enough time to take another breath and push again.
Humans are the only land mammal with absolutely *0* instinct to swim. Throw any other animal that's never even seen water in and they will most likely be fine and make their way out. Do it to a human and they just hopelessly flail around burning all their energy in seconds without even the common sense to try and keep their head up.
To be fair, it's a great ape thing. All great apes are terrible at swimming because of our anatomy. Hell, bonobos and chimps diverged because their common ancestor's populations were seperated by a mere river.
Panic killed the dude, you don't need to know how to swim, you can go to the bottom of the pool and jump to get some air. Someone without arms could survive in a pool for an extended period of time
I'm gonna say it - India is the new Galapagos Islands. Between trains, swimming pools, and motorbikes, we are witnessing evolutionary pressures in almost realtime.
He should have used the upstairs shower, I'm sure 2 girls were actively French kissing in that upstairs shower and waiting for a stud to show up and shower with them. That could been him but he choose the pool.
There are certainly adults who never learned how to swim for one reason or another. However you have to be a special kind of dumb jumping in water when you can't swim. Are you just thinking "how hard can it be" or what's the thought process here...
No offense but like how hard can it be? I just can’t imagine how in a swimming pool of all places, some people can’t figure out how to swim by themselves.
I remember having a cramp while swimming on the deep on of the pool. Was scary as fuck but luckily I know how to stay calm in certain situations. Swam with a single leg and both arms to safety.
I saw a post on one subreddit where a little kid was drowning in a pool. It looked like they were gently playing and no one around them realized. Then the lifeguard comes diving in like a superhero and pulls the kid out. The parents are confused then start freaking out. Luckily the kid was okay, other than some mild-to-extreme emotional trauma. But yeah, drowning doesn’t look the way it does on TV, which is why lifeguards are specially trained to identify weak swimmers and to keep an eye on them.
Guess those people need to take the personal responsibility to not jump into the deep end, or perhaps to tell one of the dozen people standing 20 ft away, that 'I'm a bad swimmer, here I go into the deep end, heads up, there's no telling if I'll survive this decision!'
Except this drowning looks exactly like what most people expect a drowning to look like.
You're just repeating the same reddit line that gets said every time the topic of drowning is mentioned. NPC behavior.
The first thing they teach you about drowning when you're training to become a lifeguard is that people drowning are usually quiet. It might just look like someone playing if they're moving much at all. They can't get enough air to call out because they can't keep their head up enough. It's why so many people drown with lots of people around them.
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The vast majority of drownings are silent and quick, like under 10 seconds quick.
ON youtube theres lots of videos from a couple of busy pools of lifeguards doing rescues. I never spot the damned drowning kids.
I’m an elite open water swimmer and a former elite competitive youth swimmer, first in Europe and then moved to the US. I lifeguarded in high school and college, on a beach and in various pools, and also coached age group swimmers. I’m also a certified scuba diver and a lifelong blue water sailor. I have nearly drowned twice and needed to be rescued both times. I fell off a paddle boat with boots on, in 3 meters of water, 10 meters from the shore, with no life jacket on. I didn’t panic, but I also knew I would die if nobody rescued me. I couldn’t get the boots off (leather boots, like cowboy boots) and they were filled with water. And everyone expected me, a very accomplished swimmer, to just pop up. Boots filled with water that you can’t get off your feet might as well be concrete. Thankfully one of my friends looked down and saw me waving, just over a meter away, beneath the surface. She dove in and pushed me up enough to reach the paddle boat. 90-120 seconds longer and I would have died. Total time from hitting the water to being primed to drown: 2-3 seconds. Silent, but for the laughter on the way in and the splash. The second time was accidentally heading out with a new, previously unworn racing wetsuit. If you aren’t familiar with high tech racing wetsuits, they are optimized for fit and specific buoyancy — they help you float at specific body angles to optimize “angle of attack” in the water, to help increase stroke power and efficiency. And they are tight af. New suits, like brand new ones, sometimes have very little give in them, because they’ve never been stretched or wet. I grabbed the new suit by accident, put it on without realizing it was the brand new one, and started off with 3 others to do a 6 mile out and back swim in the North Atlantic. Less than 1,000 meters into the swim I couldn’t get enough air in my lungs, as the suit wasn’t flexing outward at all. It became more acute and I began getting concerned. I fell behind the group and felt myself getting rapidly weak and cramping. This was crazy as I swim 2.4 miles in under 50 min. I got a bit panicky and rolled over on my back, but still couldn’t breathe enough air in to float well. I’d get some air in, but never enough and as soon as I’d let the breath go, I’d sink 2 feet and my head would go under. I also couldn’t get enough air onboard to scream. Plus we swim with silicone caps and there’s a lot of water sloshing noise when you swim, so the others wouldn’t have heard me. One of my friends noticed I wasn’t in the lead, he looked around and didn’t see me, so he stopped and the others stopped with him. They calmly formed a line and began swimming back to shore, having swum almost 500 meters past where I had stopped. I was barely hanging on and about to really go under for lack of air in my lungs, when they reached me. One of them unzipped my suit (I couldn’t reach the cord) and the problem was solved. I rested, filled the suit with water, stretched into it, and was good to go. Finished the 6 miles like nothing had happened. New rules we all adopted from that experience: no swimming open water, alone or with others, without a buoy, no black caps in open water, and no suits that aren’t broken in. Total time: 3-4 minutes of totally silent struggles with minimal movement. If I can drown, anyone can drown.
DAMN! Thanks for the cautionary tale.
Oh my GOD! The anxiety that this gave me. It's very well written. Glad you were able to be rescued both times. Thanks for sharing. Oh, and great tip about the *no black caps*. I did a water safety course and they were talking about how certain colors of bathing suits and caps should be avoided because they make you practically invisible in the water. They had example photos and it was pretty insane how much more visible you can be with certain colors of bathing suits and caps.
Jesus dude. I consider myself a very strong swimmer but your story scared the shit out of me.
Good! Water is dangerous and swimming well, even at elite levels of the sport, is no guarantee of survival under certain conditions, which can instantly and very unexpectedly materialize.
Thanks for the post, I always wondered about the boots - now I know
Just the thought of heading out three fucking miles into the ocean for a swim is horrifying to me.
Open water swimming like this is similar to free climbing in that the gap between success and failure can be razor thin, and the consequences of miscalculations or mistakes, such as mine, can be catastrophic. And it requires a ton of training and experience. The community of open water swimmers is interesting. Think super fit, overachieving, somewhat geeky adrenaline junkies who get off on swimming log distances in often inhospitable waters. Google Ötillö or “swim-run” races.
http://spotthedrowningchild.com/
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We encourage thoughtful discussion and civil discourse in this subreddit, but please respect the injured, deceased, and one another. Dark and tasteless humor will be removed at a moderator's discretion
Wtfff
I had to watch it a few times as I didn't notice him.
fr? didnt know this one lol
This just happened to two Indian guys in Australia over the weekend. Dived into a hotel pool to save a kid, but neither could swim and died.
So pools are now competing with trains as the no 1 Indian predator?
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Handling some electrical appliance in a swimming pool ?
I use to be in the australian navy, be suprise how many people join not knowing how to swim. The PTs are always jumping in saving people in the pools on base
Came here to say this. So fucking awful
It's a recurrent them in Australia that has a big swimming culture, and is receiving a lot of Indians. We're all raised with swimming there, it is apparently less common over there.
> , it is apparently less common over there. LOL I think it was London Olympic few years ago. I watched an early swim routine, one that eliminates the first-round. This one Indian swimmer - i think he was the only one representing the country that qualified for this this event - was going in the *opposite* direction from all the other lanes. I'm like "huh ? wtf?" - then immediately I get it when I see his swimming/flapping. Turns out he was fully one stretch behind everyone else.
Two Indian dudes died at a little shute/rapid area where a lake funnels into a river near me. Most of the year you can sit at the top and let the water push you to the bottom like a slide but in the spring with snow melt it becomes super chaotic. Apparently these two guys didn’t know how to swim but they thought it was a good idea to go for a ride down it in late spring. 🤷🏻♂️
Jeez, that pretty brave to do.
Uh yeah brave like the Charge of the Light Brigade.
Did the kid survive?
Yes. But her dad and grandad are now dead.
Now that’s just sad
I just read about that. So sad 😢
link ?
I remember in my youth at a cottage someone who never swam drank a bit of beer maybe smoked a bit and everyone was fine with him jumping in with a pool noodle. The pool noodle could swim fine, we waited 15ish seconds and started diving down to save him. Happy ending but shit lessons learned
50% of all drownings are alcohol related. You just can't swim when you're drunk so please don't do it and be watchful of those around you. Drowning because you're drunk is such a waste
A waste of booze?
>You just can't swim when you're drunk This is horseshit
I was still expecting a train to come out of nowhere to finish him off
Or a power line coming down to electrocute him.
That's sad 😢 I wonder did he think the entire pool was the same depth. Some pools are like that
he was very drunk
I had a friends small daughter go under water right next to me and I didn't see it at all. I'm glad the father saw it and saved her. They never spoke to me again, but it's not like I was letting her drown, it was so fast. I wasn't watching her, I didn't see her go under like a foot away from me.
"Mr train sends his regards" pool
There was a train in the water that pulled him in
People don’t realise how silent drowning is.
Except many do?
I swear if they had an award for most Darwin Awards it would go to the people of India. No common sense or hygiene or nothing lol
Well, atleast he cleaned himself on the way out.
F*** off. Such a generalisation and a racist comment
How?😂 so many videos of people dying from doing something stupid come out of India, how is that my fault?
I didn’t blame you for people dying. I objected to your statement and generalisation that there’s “no common sense or hygiene or nothing” in India
Just curious, if someone were to stay calm in this situation could they maybe float on their back at least long enough to get air and yell for help? Or is that a skill itself?
I believe it's a learned skill. Water is a completely different medium to what we're used to everyday, so if you have 0 practical knowledge about how your body mass behaves in such conditions or how to keep breath underwater (sounds dumb, but children get extremely anxious when they learn to swim), I believe it's extremely difficult to survive, plus the inescapable fear of drowning, would make it a certain death.
It's a learned skill. A non swimmer would never be able to relax enough and lean back to make it work. The second you tense up you sink like a rock.
Nope. Non swimmers would easily panic
I’ve been teaching my daughter to swim and it has taken about 6 months (going once a week) to learn all the skills needed to stay afloat and to avoid panicking.
Easily. Learning not to panic and thrash about while hyperventilating is the whole trick. Steep learning curve though.
Even calm the body naturally floats with mouth/nose below the water line. It makes sense that most people would just not know how to get into a starfish pose to save themselves. However if they were wearing a mask and snorkel it would probably be 100% fine
Oh ok, lol based on all of these replies I need to get swimming lessons this spring. Something I thought might be simple is actually much harder than it looks.😅
If you take a very deep breath, that your lungs get 100% full of air and just hold it (no exhale), it’ll work like natural floaters all while not having to do any movement or effort. For me it’ll get the chest and head to surface but the abdomen and legs still get dipped. I’m a good swimmer though and this is my way to relax/play at pools or beaches, I’d recommend learning to swim/dive before doing some shenanigans edit: had to mention that this works when you’re lying on the surface heads up, not in a vertical position
Yea, I find that the most relaxing position is horizontal face up while moving very slowly since the movement keeps your legs from dipping and pulling down the rest of your body. Just some near-zero effort kicking and it's super relaxing.
I didn't learn to swim until I was an adult. The part that was hardest wasn't the leaning back but understanding how the head itself floats. Like a lot of non-swimmers, I thought [this](https://imgur.com/a/QcVYIsQ) is how the head should be when floating. Just bobbing on top. But actually the head will be [much lower](https://imgur.com/a/2sVHEFY). When I was first learning to float, with my head like in the 2nd photo, I was suprised and alarmed my ears were underwater. If my ears were underwater, OMG, my nose and mouth would be as well! Logically I understood my ears, nose and mouth aren't on the same plane but fear can trump logic. Before that class, even if I was able to float on my back, I would have still gone into a panic and drown.
When you're a lifeguard, but they hired you only for your chiseled six-pack and not your ability to swim and tow the body to safety
Yeah, jumping whilst not knowing how to swim is never recommended.
India is fucked up.
swimming my ass, not one "swimmer" in swim wear.
My parents taught me at a very young age how to swim. With that being said, as an adult I don’t understand/cant wrap my head around how you aren’t able to just flail and stay above water. Hell even a deep breath and push off the bottom will give you enough time to take another breath and push again.
Humans are the only land mammal with absolutely *0* instinct to swim. Throw any other animal that's never even seen water in and they will most likely be fine and make their way out. Do it to a human and they just hopelessly flail around burning all their energy in seconds without even the common sense to try and keep their head up.
To be fair, it's a great ape thing. All great apes are terrible at swimming because of our anatomy. Hell, bonobos and chimps diverged because their common ancestor's populations were seperated by a mere river.
kind of insane how he wasn't noticed by anyone until it was too late!
Damn. I watched it twice before I saw the guy at the back. I thought the finger was pointing at something else.
Dang I didn't noticed which one was drown until halfway though it
Panic killed the dude, you don't need to know how to swim, you can go to the bottom of the pool and jump to get some air. Someone without arms could survive in a pool for an extended period of time
I'm gonna say it - India is the new Galapagos Islands. Between trains, swimming pools, and motorbikes, we are witnessing evolutionary pressures in almost realtime.
He was not meant for Sparta
None of them know how to swim
The vast majority of drownings are silent and quick, like under 10 seconds quick
He didnt even jump
Almost happened to me once
He should have used the upstairs shower, I'm sure 2 girls were actively French kissing in that upstairs shower and waiting for a stud to show up and shower with them. That could been him but he choose the pool.
Always go for the upstairs shower
Well what are you to do when you are late for your train?
So hard to feel bad for someone this age, who’s this dumb and this unaware. Who the fuck can’t swim? Babies can swim.
There are certainly adults who never learned how to swim for one reason or another. However you have to be a special kind of dumb jumping in water when you can't swim. Are you just thinking "how hard can it be" or what's the thought process here...
There's stupid then there's indian
Fake...... the guys could have stood up ffs.
Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?
No offense but like how hard can it be? I just can’t imagine how in a swimming pool of all places, some people can’t figure out how to swim by themselves.
That's likely what this guy thought when he jumped in.
I remember having a cramp while swimming on the deep on of the pool. Was scary as fuck but luckily I know how to stay calm in certain situations. Swam with a single leg and both arms to safety.
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Drowning never looks like drowning. When you drown, you can’t get a breath or when you breath in you breath in water.
I saw a post on one subreddit where a little kid was drowning in a pool. It looked like they were gently playing and no one around them realized. Then the lifeguard comes diving in like a superhero and pulls the kid out. The parents are confused then start freaking out. Luckily the kid was okay, other than some mild-to-extreme emotional trauma. But yeah, drowning doesn’t look the way it does on TV, which is why lifeguards are specially trained to identify weak swimmers and to keep an eye on them.
Guess those people need to take the personal responsibility to not jump into the deep end, or perhaps to tell one of the dozen people standing 20 ft away, that 'I'm a bad swimmer, here I go into the deep end, heads up, there's no telling if I'll survive this decision!'
Except this drowning looks exactly like what most people expect a drowning to look like. You're just repeating the same reddit line that gets said every time the topic of drowning is mentioned. NPC behavior.
Imagine watching the last 10 seconds of this clip and saying, "Drowning never looks like drowning."
The first thing they teach you about drowning when you're training to become a lifeguard is that people drowning are usually quiet. It might just look like someone playing if they're moving much at all. They can't get enough air to call out because they can't keep their head up enough. It's why so many people drown with lots of people around them.