Lyme Regis: Man rescued from sea by marine (From Bridport and Lyme Regis News)
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Lyme Regis: Man rescued from sea by marine
12:00am Friday 7th September 2012 in Lyme Regis By Anne Bell
A QUICK-thinking member of the public ran to pull a man from the sea after he got into difficulties off the beach at Lyme Regis .
The good Samaritan, a Royal Marine, realised that the swimmer was struggling to get out of the waves as the sea conditions and the steep pebbles kept sucking him back into the water.
Exhausted and cold, the holidaymaker was pulled from the sea near the Bay Hotel and was treated by a paramedic, members of the local fire service and coastguards.
Lyme Regis Coastguard station officer Graham Turner said that people should not underestimate the pull of the sea in choppy or unsettled conditions, even when swimming just off the beach. He said: “This could have been a lot worse, if the passer-by had not seen this man having trouble and had not gone straight in and pulled him out.
“The man in the sea was about 65, and quite large and had just got worn out.
“He was thoroughly checked over, laid down and wrapped in a blanket and we escorted him back to his car at the Holmbush car park to make sure he was all right.
“Luckily, he had not swallowed salt water, which is something that could have caused problems later.”
The alert came near the end of a busy summer for coastguards, lifeguards and the lifeboat in the Lyme Regis area.
Incidents over the holidays included two people stranded on an inflatable off West Bay in thick fog.
In a separate incident, two teenage boys had to be rescued by the lifeboat after their rubber dinghy burst.
They spent two hours in the water before being rescued a mile off the coast after being reported missing from Axmouth.
A father and his son were rescued by the Lyme lifeboat after their inflatable dinghy overturned several hundred yards off Charmouth beach.
The lifeboat was launched and RNLI lifeguards had to go to the aid of a child in an inflatable drifting off the beach at Lyme.
