She couldn't swim to help her drowning friend — then a fisherman battling seizures unveiled a genius rescue
There are some incidents that a person will never forget in their lifetime. Two friends faced a similar situation when one of them was drowning and the other one could not swim to go and save her. She ran for help and asked people on Pensacola Beach, Florida, if anyone knew how to swim, but was met with negative answers. Soon enough, a shark fisherman on the beach named Andrew Smith came up with a novel idea to save the girl who was minutes away from drowning, per WEAR Channel 3 News.
Smith was 100 yards away from the scene when the girl started drowning, and he didn't know how to swim either. However, he got an idea to drop a flotation device in the water with the help of a fishing drone. He had just clocked out of work at that time and didn't want to go fishing when he was convinced by his friend to do so. "I wasn't even going to go out, but my friend convinced me to go," Smith recounted. He eventually went down for fishing and was sitting there when a girl came running towards them. She was asking people if any of them could swim. "I said no, I absolutely cannot swim." The girl was running and screaming, but nobody on the beach could swim.
"Her friend was getting sucked more and more out. I looked down at the drone, and I was like, well, the drone can swim, I can't." Smith ran to get a floating device and attached it to his drone, but unfortunately, he released it too early and the device couldn't get to the girl as it was very windy. "It wasn't close at all." The teenager had been in the rip currents for 5 minutes at that time. "I was shaking pretty badly. I about cried," the fisherman recounted. A bystander gave him another flotation device to send his drone back once more. Another person, Robert Ney, started filming the rescue operation after that. Ney could see they didn't have much time to save the girl.
Smith flew the drone to the girl again and was extra careful about the wind and all the other things to ensure she got the device this time. "I had to kind of go slower and slower down to her because that was it. That was the last opportunity we were going to have." In the second attempt, he could finally give the flotation device to the girl. "I lowered it until I could see her hands grab it and then I lowered it a little more and then I released it." The fisherman cannot go kayaking because of his seizure disorder and has recently purchased a new drone for fishing after his old one was damaged.
The girl got onto the device and sometime later, the first responders made it to the scene. However, she couldn't have been saved if Smith hadn't come up with the idea. The medical team checked her and she went home after that. The teenager's father thanked Smith and called him her "guardian angel." Smith wants people to pay more attention to the flag system before going into the water. There was one red flag flying on the day the girl was about to drown.