Many parents mean well in their crude attempts to teach their children to swim. Some approaches may stem from impatience and laziness, such as simply throwing the child off the end of a dock or over the side of a boat with the instruction “swim or drown!”

This was my unfortunate experience at the tender age of 7 or 8 years old. The result was not the traditional, smoothly orchestrated overhead stroke that an Olympic swimmer demonstrates, but rather uncontrollable thrashing and churning in attempts to keep one’s head above the water. Oh, I mustn’t let go of the accompanying panic and frantic gasping for air and the occasional gulp of water. It doesn’t take long for instinct and love of life to kick in before you begin to swim as many of God’s creatures would under the same circumstances. From mice, cats, and dogs to horses, hippos, and elephants, they all take the lead from the dog and start “paddling like dogs” to stay afloat and get to safety.

As a result of this barbaric approach to water safety training, I have a fear of deep water, which is any water too deep for my chin to stay dry. In addition to paddling with the dog, I taught myself how to float on my back. As a result, as long as the water is calm, I can cover a fairly long distance alternating between paddling with the dog and floating on my back using the backstroke.

This is fine and elegant in a lake, pond, or pool. In fact, that’s the only way I passed the swim test at Navy Boot Camp, and I didn’t get my toes stepped on like some did by grabbing the edge of the pool before the allotted time was up. It would never have happened if the test had taken place in choppy water because I would panic when water got up my nose!

An electrician never really respects the danger of electricity until he experiences a non-fatal electrocution like I did. The potential danger of water is no different from that of electricity, as the results of drowning are identical to electrocution: permanent!

Several years ago, while my dog ​​was paddling out to a reef off the coast of Cancun, I was saved from being quickly swept out to sea by a 10-mile-per-hour current. There was a big cable stretched from shore to the reef specifically for that reason, the rip current. I experienced first-hand the phenomenon of “your life flashing before your eyes.” It was a horrible experience that was magnified on the last day of our vacation at Hotel Krystal as we waited on the seaside terrace for the airport shuttle. We were just soaking up the last of the tropical resort sights and smells when the quiet atmosphere was broken by distant screams muffled by the roar of violent waves created by a recent storm.

Looking in the direction of the screams, we could see a group of about eight people gathered on the shore about two hundred meters from the beach screaming frantically for help. My eyes strayed from the crowd over the churning foam and thunderous wave crashing toward a man struggling to stay upright as he struggled to reach the shore. At that moment, two more people entered the surf to help this exhausted man to shore. Arriving at the beach he collapsed on the ground.

That’s when someone in our group yelled “Oh my God” and pointed to a second man who was a considerable distance from shore, apparently also unsuccessfully trying to outswim the current. Then I noticed a head bobbing in the water 40-40 to 15 meters away. Less than a minute later he could no longer be seen; in another minute the second man disappeared below the surface. My only thoughts were, where are the lifeguards, the rescue team, how could this happen? That could have been me or my wife!

Paradise was instantly transformed into a place of shock, horror, pain and disbelief and sadly became the overwhelming memory of the entire trip and vacation.

So you can imagine what it must have been like to experience the same thing again 35 years later in the waves of San Diego. I mean unexpectedly getting caught in a high tide and being swept out to sea, undetected by lifeguards or people on the beach. Thank God my wife is an athlete and an expert swimmer, because she was able to beat the current and bring us both to shore before I lost all my strength. I was saved once by a wire and once by my wife.

My awareness of the dangers of water is acute; and as a consequence of my close encounters and brushes with death I share this story with the hope of saving even one life. There is a device similar to a life preserver, only smaller, that can be thrown more than 100 feet to a drowning person in seconds without needing to enter the water and risk their own life.

It is a throwing disk with a rope wrapped around it. It is thrown like a Frisbee and makes it easy for the drowning person to reach for the disc or rope. They can be found in the trunks of almost every police car, fire truck, coast guard, border patrol, and water rescue team. They are called rescue discs or Frisbee-type water discs, life-saving discs and water rescue discs. Children have used these devices to save adult lives.

In Tennessee, six people thrown from a raft were saved using a rescue disk. Those men in Cancún would be alive today if the people on the ground had one. These rescue discs have saved thousands of lives and only cost between $32 and $135. What is a life worth?