This article was featured in Alta Journal's free Weekend Read newsletter.īehind Garrett, the waves thundered ashore onto Santa Monica Beach, kicking up a salty mist in the darkness. The first rule of ocean safety is to respect the sea, and you learn it quickly, swimming under a wave four times your height. Diving under large waves, lifeguards learn to claw their fingers into the sandy sea bottom to hold themselves steady. Plunging into the murky, roiling darkness, the ocean turning colder as he neared the bottom, Garrett would have felt the power of each wave as it passed overhead, briefly sucking him backward. But to get past the break, as each huge mountain of water rose up out of the ocean, he’d have to dive underneath. Garrett’s training was to never take his eyes off the victim, in this case the wallowing fishing boat. Back then in the 1940s, the inflatable life-saving devices were still experimental, sometimes deflating during rescues, but they were easier to haul on long swims than the heavier steel rescue cans that lifeguards dubbed Rescue Torpedoes. Garrett was naked to the waist in the cold Pacific and equipped with only a pair of yellow rescue tubes. Garrett would have known nothing about them-just that they needed rescue. There were two aboard on that stormy night of December 5, 1945: Chester Gannon, 30, and Dee Sharbono, 32. She was disabled, dead in the water, pitching and rolling on a 25-foot swell. Santa Monica lifeguard Arthur Garrett swam through the black heaving ocean toward the fishing boat Patsy Jane.
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