Tuesday, August 5, 2008

I feel really bad about all of the people who drown in Lake Michigan over by the Indiana Dunes every weekend. Perhaps it’s the nerdy Rescue Diver in me, but I feel compelled to blog about this. There is no undertow in Lake Michigan. There are only rip currents. Rip currents won’t pull you under, they will just pull you away from shore. People panic when they can’t get back to shore easily and then they get tired and drown. If you are caught in a rip current, the best thing to do is swim parallel to the shore. Rip currents aren’t usually wider than 100 feet and you can swim through them and then back in. You can also just float (on your back if you can) out of the rip current and into shore.

You might not need to know this information for yourself, but it might come in handy if you are at the beach and see someone else having trouble. I think that the Spanish-speaking radio stations should make an effort to get this information out to their listeners in their native tongue (I can only do so much). I am not trying to stereotype, it’s just that it seems like a lot of people from Hispanic families drown in the lake. The Indiana Dunes are a really great spot and easily accessible by train from Chicago, so they make a very attractive picnic spot for a lot of people. The Indiana Dunes also have a great Web site and it has more information about the lake than one could possibly want.

As I was watching all of the searching for the drowned 13-year-old boy on Sunday evening and Monday afternoon, I was thinking that it might be cheaper to have a few more lifeguards posted (even at the closed beaches) and probably a lot less traumatic. It can’t really cost the taxpayers any more than a full-on search, and it would make walking on the beach more fun. It would give the Dunes area a sort of Baywatch feel. I’d much rather see hot kids in their red bathing suits patrolling the beaches than a bunch of Indiana cops on a Zodiac looking for a corpse. Maybe they could even get the lovely Pamela Anderson to come and throw out the first rescue can.