Another day, another near-disaster on the Cornish coast. This time, a father and his 14-year-old son learned the hard way that the Atlantic doesn’t care about your holiday plans. The pair had to be hauled from the freezing, churning waters off north Cornwall after their kayaking trip went south. Fast.
It started just after 10:40 BST on Thursday. The call came in. A kid was in the water, and two empty kayaks were drifting aimlessly near Boscastle. The Port Isaac RNLI lifeboat crew scrambled.
When the rescue crew reached Penally Point, they found a mess. The father and son were stranded on jagged rocks. They were on opposite sides of a wide, foaming gully. Waves were slamming into the stone at heights of 1.5 meters. It was a nightmare scenario. One slip, and they were gone.
An RNLI crewman jumped ashore. He calmed them down. Then, he loaded them into the boat. One by one. They were shivering but alive. The crew dropped them off at Boscastle Harbour, where coastguard teams were waiting to warm them up. But the job wasn’t done. The crew had to go back out into the swell to retrieve the abandoned kayaks. All in all, it was a grueling two-and-a-half-hour ordeal.
The rescue was a team effort. Boscastle NCI spotted the trouble and alerted the Falmouth Coastguard. They triggered a massive multi-agency scramble. Boscastle Coastguard split their forces, sending teams to both the north and south sides of the harbour just to keep eyes on the victims.
It was a busy morning for the local lifesavers. This was their second call-out before lunch. Earlier, they were at Trebarwith Strand. A man had slipped off the rocks there, sustaining a nasty head injury. He ended up in the back of an ambulance. Tourists, it seems, never learn.
