“We’re a team of 12 at Rhyl and that night we were at the station practicing", says Deputy Station Officer Dylan, "it was quite a chilled-out and relaxed session, doing casualty care and theory of mud rescue. We were just finishing up when Ian nipped outside..."
Ian adds: “I’d just gone to put some equipment in the back of our rescue vehicle and fellow coastguard rescue officer Andrea had come out with me. Our vehicle was parked backing out to the beaches and sea, and as we were chatting I could see something that just didn’t look right.”
Amid the darkening evening skyline, Station Officer Ian made out something strange. Jutting out into the rising tide was a young person clinging to a marker post at the end of one of the wooden beach groynes.
“At first, it looked like a child above the water with what seemed to be a family member wading in towards them. The more I looked, the more it felt like an emergency."
Andrea and Ian both sprang into action, shouting the rest of the team and calling the ops room to update on the situation. Meanwhile, the person who’d started heading towards the youngster seemed to be struggling, and Ian instructed his team to get suited up for a double water rescue.
“The team were putting on their dry suits and lifejackets and grabbing throw ropes, while I was in the coastguard rescue vehicle, ready to head about 300 metres to the beach. One of our team ran down to speak to a person on the coast who was watching the scene unfold and he turned out to be a friend of the man in the water.
Dylan says: “The wader made it to the young person but he’d become in danger too, balancing and stuck on the end of the groyne, with the teenager trying to find higher ground on a narrow peak of sand bank while waves crashed around her."
Getting down to the water’s edge, the two coastguards, held secure by rope lines, waded and swam for the youngster first, pulling her back to shore, then going back in for the man.
“It quickly occurred to us that the girl was actually on her own,” says Ian, “we'd been wrong because the man going in was actually a bystander who’d seen the girl in distress. It turned out that she’d been on the beach with her friends, who’d dared her to go onto the sandbank. When she got into difficulty, they’d ran off without seeking help and left her there.”
“Had we not seen them, it could have been a very different situation, couldn’t it?” says Dylan, who's volunteered with HM Coastguard for the past 10 years. “It takes some of the team 15 minutes to get to the station, and had we been called in from home that night, I really think she’d have been taken out by the tide before we’d have gotten on scene.”
Getting the young casualty’s contact details, police officers visited the child’s address to find parents deep in panic and unaware that she’d gone to the beach. Coastguard officers also discovered that the rescued adult was in possession of a mobile phone, but he hadn’t dialled 999 and asked for the Coastguard.
“It was brave but ultimately also short-sighted - he’d not thought of Plan B and he'd become a second casualty. We offered to take him back to the boathouse to get dry and thank him for his efforts, but he wanted to be on his way and didn’t want any further help,” says Dylan.
The topography of Rhyl contributes to its volume of coastal incidents, with a tide of around three quarters of a mile making the busy tourist town no stranger to call-outs for Ian’s team. “The inflatables, Ryhl's sandbanks and mud, its wind, and missing children. After being in the team for 15 years, there are still only three or four incidents that I recall so vividly. This is one,” he says.
“Seeing the girl’s micro scooter near the beach reminded us of her young age and the amount of danger she’d been in. We really made a difference that night – we were in the right place at the right time and we saved lives.”