Dauphin Island Sea Lab class leads to rip current rescue

Swim parallel to the shore

A graphic from the National Weather Service describes how to escape rip currents.

It’s no accident that University of Alabama professor Emily Elliott worked some practical information about rip tides into a marine geology class she recently taught for the Dauphin Island Sea Lab. But it was still a surprise to see it have real-world results.

Elliott recently heard from one of her students, Shelby Hatchett, that the lesson had helped her resolve a potentially disastrous situation on July 4 in the Panama City Beach area.

As Hatchett tells it, she and her family had gone out to the beach, and as she looked at it she remembered some guidance from Elliott’s class. “We were actually talking about the geology of the bottom, the sea floor, how it affects waves and currents,” she said.

“I remember pointing out to my family, there was a potential [for a rip current],” she said. She shared the common advice, which is that people caught in a rip current should swim parallel to the shore to escape it rather than fighting its powerful flow directly.

Red flags were flying, but some people were swimming anyway. A while later, the family noticed a swimmer waving his arms and yelling. “All of a sudden, Mom was like, ‘Why is that dude acting like that?” said Hatchett, who’ll soon begin her senior year at the University of Alabama.

As Hatchett approached the teenager, she found that he wasn’t in distress himself. But he couldn’t speak English and he was trying to draw attention to someone who was.

“I saw this guy bobbing, way far out,” she said. She swam partway to him and began yelling at him to swim along the shoreline. By the time he made it in he was complaining of leg cramps and exhaustion. Friends had to help him walk back to their spot on the shore. And that was the end of it: No authorities got involved, and Hatchett and the almost-victim never exchanged names or followed up.

Hatchett didn’t publicize it, other than to share it with Elliott, who shared it with other students and Sea Lab staff, who thought it was a lesson that might be of public interest. Elliott, for her part, finds it completely credible: She described Hatchett as “one of the most diligent students I’ve ever had in a class.”

Elliott said she has a couple of reasons for sneaking advice on how to spot and recognize rip currents into a class. The first is that as a former lifeguard in high school and college, and someone who still enjoys surfing, it’s on her mind.

While attending graduate school in North Carolina, she said, she and friends were out surfing when they saw two children who were farther out from the beach than they should have been. “Sure enough, they had gotten caught in a rip,” she said.

“With surfing, we love rip currents because it takes us right out,” she said. But she’s seen firsthand how scary they can be for swimmers, and how fast they can carry people away from shore.

The second is that she likes for her classes to have a practical side even for students who won’t be pursuing careers in marine geology. “My hope is students can gain an understanding and appreciation for the world around them,” she said. “I do feel really passionate about trying to help students understand real-world conditions.”

To her, that makes it natural to throw in a few words about how to survive a rip current, when talking about how shorelines can create them.

The irony here is that Elliott and Hatchett both were supposed to be at the sea lab for that lesson during a short early summer semester in June. Elliott, an adjunct faculty member and a research scientist at UA, normally would have spent the month on the island.

The COVID-19 epidemic shut down those plans and turned it into a virtual lesson.

“It’s super-random that I was taking the class,” said Hatchett, who’s about to begin her senior year at Alabama and who plans to become a dentist. “I never thought I’d be getting a life lesson out of the screen.”

For Elliott there was nothing virtual about the payoff.

“When I got that message from Shelby, I couldn’t be more proud,” said Elliott. “I was excited that she could recognize where there was a likely rip current.”

“There’s a lot more we can do in this world than we often think about,” she said.

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