It was between the beach and a shelf and the water beneath the surface was moving independent of the surface.
This is making me remember my swimming lessons as a lad.
They enthusiastically taught us “drownproofing” a technique whereby you bob vertically in the water, and just exert a small amount of arm or leg motion, move up, take a quick breath and then relax again.
I tried very hard to master this technique. Relaxed as instructed, vertical in the water. Small motions to move to the surface. Surface was now 10 feet above me. Larger motions. LARGE motions. Get to surface. Take big breath. Relax again. Sink down down until I am standing on bottom of pool.
My instructors told me to stop fooling around. EVERYone floats, they were told. Just relax. Float. I again sink to the bottom.
I failed drown-proofing.
At that age, I had no fat whatsoever. I could literally sit on the bottom of the pool with no effort at all.
One time we were at the end of a dock on a private lake. My wife, I, and our 2-yr old were looking at the fish. Our dog came up - presumably to see what we were looking at. He bumped our daughter, and she fell in the lake - and sank like a rock! 30 years later I can still see the surprised look on her face as she dropped backwards through the water.
The water was <6 feet deep, so my wife jumped in and grabbed her - no harm done. But that day disavowed me of any belief that drowning people would necessarily thrash around, come up 3 times, or anything other than sink.
Recent sad case in point in the UK (and the river in question isn’t some mighty tidal flow - but the bench where she had been sitting is at the top of a steep and muddy slope above the river):
I’ve been told that the idea that clothes will drag you down is a myth. Is that incorrect? Wet clothes will certainly make it harder to move through the water and may impede rescue, but I don’t see why they would make you sink.
I live in an area with a lot of smallish inland lakes all around, and we occasionally have heard of someone jumping off a boat or something and not coming back up in one of those lakes, so I’ve wondered the same thing. Riptides or undertows would not be an issue in an inland lake.
Those lakes do often have a lot of thick seaweed that grows many feet tall from the lake bed, especially later in the summer. I’ve wondered how easy it would be to get tangled up in the seaweed and drown before you were able to free yourself and get back to the surface.
I have no idea how relatively buoyant my body is, but when I had a drowning scare clothing and other accoutrements didn’t feel like they were dragging me down, and I was definitely not overweight.
It was about twenty years ago and I was wadefishing in the surf when a rip current knocked my legs out from under me and started pulling me away from the beach. I was wearing shoes (just old canvas tennis shoes), fishing shorts, a long sleeved fishing shirt with about a half-pound of shrimp in the pockets, a wide-brimmed hat, and wearing a wading belt. Clipped or tethered to the belt were a stringer, pliers, a small net, and my rod and reel.
I knew the procedure for dealing with rip currents and began to swim with the current for a moment until I oriented myself and began to swim parallel to the beach. After only about a minute I was out of the current and only had to swim ten or twenty yards until I was back to the sand bar. Thanks to a leather neck-strap I didn’t even lose my hat!
I sink and stay on the bottom of freshwater if I exhale. But, of course, that’s not a complete exhale. It’s not even a very vigorous one. I bet if I inhaled water when plunged into the water, I’d sink rapidly unless I stayed oriented and swam upwards. All sorts of things could go wrong with that.
Really, skeletons are pretty heavy, and fat isn’t that good a float. Perhaps it’s the air in the lungs that pretty much dictate floating versus sinking.
Yes I agree. Ive been playing /surfing in water for 60 years and prefer salt for flotation. I dont like swimming in fresh as I feel like a slug. I can sink to the bottom pretty quickly when I empty my lungs.
We would do that as kids, empty our lungs, sink to the bottom (10 ft or so) and have a “tea party” on the bottom for as long as we could.
In the ocean, under challenging conditions, cold water or heavy surf, you really need to have as much air in your lungs as possible. All sorts of currents trying to hold you down.
New co2 inflatable vests have let the big wave surfers save themselves from drowning, they pop up like corks.
Another point is sometimes you simply don’t realize you are currently in the process of drowning until it’s too late. People think they are just “in a little bit of trouble” or struggling a little, when they are actually drowning.
Many are embarrassed to call for help because the situation seems salvageable if only they could get their legs going the right way or if only they could get one good breath.
Negative buoyancy is a thing, and I can personally attest (as can a few others in this thread). Staying afloat is a constant effort for me. If I lay on my back, and keep moving my legs and arms, I can just keep my face above water.
Naturally buoyant people (like my wife) find it hard to believe that all humans don’t just effortlessly float. I’ve demonstrated in swimming pools what occurs if I put no effort whatsoever in. I don’t necessarily sink to the bottom, but I definitely drop well below the surface. I can swim okay, say across the pool, but it takes a lot of effort, and there’s a lot of water churning. I’m definitely not one of those swimmers that knifes through the water with quiet grace.
I’ve told my wife if I ever fall overboard at sea, they have about ten minutes to find me or I’m a goner. And ten minutes is probably at the outside.
This. My neutral buoyancy point is about 2 feet under.
Reading this thread, I think the answer to the OP’s question of how people fail to resurface is:
“All too easily.”
I don’t know, but I think it takes more effort to swim with clothing (long pants, coat, etc.), and maybe in those cases exhaustion is a contributing factor.
There’s a reason one of the “fun” swim team competition event is/was a relay with the swimmer wearing pants and a shirt.
Clothes are a serious impediment to movement, and someone wearing a voluminous dress would be in real trouble. Weight wise, most fabrics have a specific gravity of 1.2 to 1.5, with cotton being the heaviest. So once in water clothes weigh from about a fifth to a third of their weight in air. Jeans and a t-shirt will add near negligible weight. A person in full going out regalia from a bygone time might find the additional weight was enough to tip them from floating to sinking. But the idea that clothes drag you under is probably misplaced. The combination of just enough weight to tip a person from naturally floating to just sinking might be real. But the big problem is the drag and restriction of movement. Someone who couldn’t swim would have little chance.
I remember proving I could take my outer clothes off whilst in deep water forming part of a basic test of water survival skills. It wasn’t hard in still water, but you needed to know what you were doing. In less cooperative water it is not so easy.
The Boy Scout swimming merit badge includes taking off clothes and getting air into them, so they serve as flotation aids. You were supposed to take off a shirt, get it wet (not too hard to do when drowning), button the buttons, whip the shirt in the air to balloon it, and grab it somehow to float with. You were to do the same with pants; we suggested that they wear nylon pants and not jeans for this portion of the test. I can’t imagine someone who is panicking even thinking of inflating clothes, even if they’re trained in it.
Thankfully I didn’t teach this, because I could barely swim after years worth of lessons. At one summer camp, the swimming test was to jump off a dock into the lake and do the swim distances. We were there in northern Wisconsin during the first week of camp in early June, so the water was very chilly. I jumped in, immediately froze in the water and could barely move. In water that cold, I could easily see someone who had fallen off a boat gulp cold water and sink.
Isn’t that just for survival training? It’s irrelevant if you’re only in the water for a few minutes, but probably a good idea if it might be hours or more before rescue.
Decades ago, my cousin asked me to help him take his three small children swimming. The twins were about two years old and the older sister was three.
Two adults and three children, so we each watched one child and kept our eyes on the third. It was a wadding pool, but the girl lost her footing and just sank in the water. I quickly grabbed her, and all was OK, but that was a scary moment.
The lake in our boy scout camp was fed by melting snow so it was cold all year long. I had the same reaction as well.