Eagle River, Alaska surfer Scott Jones was out for a December surf on Kodiak Island when Mother Nature began conspiring against him. He say he felt like “all the bad things that could happen, happened at once,” according to a story in the Alaska Dispatch.
“I started paddling against the rip and realized there was no way I was going to get out of this,” Jones said when reached by telephone Wednesday. So he did the smart thing and went with the flow as he angled toward shore. . . “That’s when the gale force winds picked up,” Jones said. He went ashore to wait, thinking they’d die down. They didn’t. He said he tried once to paddle out and around the point. But between the rip and the wind, sea conditions were brutal. “I was getting slammed by head-high waves,” Jones said.
He ended up having to climb into a cave where he waited for either the tide to go back out so he could walk back around the point, or a helicopter rescue. The later arrived soon after and now, Jones has a Youtube rescue video to remember it by.
[Link: Alaska Dispatch]
