“This is frontier lifeguarding in some ways,” said Paul Keel, State Parks superintendent for the San Mateo County coast. “It’s more wild up here; there are more remote beaches with colder water and big surf and it’s more dangerous – for (the lifeguards) too.”
The waves, weather and rip currents up and down the Coastside are unforgiving and can surprise experienced and prepared water users, said U.S. Coast Guard spokeswoman Charity Hoffman. Her claim was given merit with the recent drowning of a kite surfer at Poplar Beach and the presumed death of a high school student off the coast of Davenport that occurred earlier in the month.
  
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The Coast Guard made 162 so-called assists in the Bay Area in 2008. Hoffman said the cases ranged from commercial fishermen and local surfers in trouble to rescues of infrequent beach visitors.
Hoffman said Coast Guard data shows no revealing correlations among incidents on the Coastside, just that the heaviest season for search and rescue teams is spring through fall, when the weather is nice and more people visit the beach.
During summer weekends, three seasonal lifeguards resume duty on the Coastside, but this time of year only four water watchers patrol the area – two lifeguards and two “aquatic rangers” – bolstered by rescue boats from the Pillar Point Harbormaster’s Office. That might seem like too few eyes to cover about 40 miles of shoreline, but four lifeguards are “really good,” Keel said – as high as staffing has been in more than a decade.
“Travel time is difficult,” he said, “but we do the best we can,” given budget constraints and the public need.
Those two factors can be tough to balance, said Tim Fellars, an aquatic ranger with State Parks, who spoke behind sunglasses at Francis State Beach on Friday. Drawing from eight years of duty in Half Moon Bay, Fellars said the average number of rescue calls per year is between eight and 10, most of which come from outside State Parks jurisdiction.
“In other places you have a bunch of (lifeguards) on duty, so it’s more a proactive approach. Here, we have to be reactive,” Fellars said, noting the difference in patrolling the shore in Southern California where lifeguards are posted every 200 yards along the beach. Most emergency calls he receives come from beachgoers, not from a 911 dispatcher.
“These are tough beaches here,” said Jeff Wadkins, the State Parks lifeguard who retrieved the body of the drowned kite surfer at Poplar Beach earlier in March. “The rip currents are like live animals, and the sand is soft, so it moves a lot.”
This year Wadkins has performed one rescue and three body recoveries up and down the coast.
The “danger areas,” Fellars says, are Gray Whale Cove State Beach, where surfers typically get pulled into cliffs at Devil’s Slide, and beaches on the South Coast, where rogue waves creep up on unsuspecting beachgoers.
Fellars said the success of most rescues on the Coastside depends on the vigilance of beachgoers and help from a variety of state, federal and local agencies.
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