A 12-year-old boy who was swept out to sea by the tide was rescued by the Coast Guard off of Crystal Beach in Texas on Wednesday.
The boy, who was clinging to an inner tube, was
pulled about 400 yards off shore, KRPC reported. He had been swimming with his family, who was on vacation from northern Texas.
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"He was very scared," Rodney Rios, with the U.S. Coast Guard, told KRPC. “He told us he was out there for about an hour trying to paddle back, but he wasn’t making much headway.”
Rios was one of four Coast Guard crew members who were called to the scene.
"Unfortunately some bad decisions left him stranded, but he contributed to his own rescue by making the wise decision to stay with his raft instead of trying to swim back to shore," said Lt. Michael Gibson, a pilot aboard the helicopter,
NBC in Dallas-Fort Worth reported. "This gave us a big target to spot and made it much easier to effect a rescue."
Another teenager wasn’t so lucky in Ocean City, Maryland. Don Pen Soh Boma, 18, was caught in a rip current last week, along with two other swimmers. The other two were rescued, but Boma drowned.
Beach Patrol told CBS Baltimore that Boma was on a buoy but fell off as they brought him to shore. It took 15 rescuers about an hour to find his body after that.
“I used to surf out here a lot and the rip currents get real strong,” Orrie Vetra told CBS.
Officials told CBS that getting caught in rip currents is what causes about 80 percent of water rescues.
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