‘I’m dragging myself down as well’: Family’s Labour Day beach trip nearly ends in tragedy

What should have been a relaxing end to the Labour Day long weekend turned into a nearly catastrophic situation for a Prince Edward Island family on Monday, because of what is thought to have been a strong North Shore rip current or undertow.

Izabela Bryniarska brought her son Léo Barrière, 11, and daughter Maya Barrière, 14, to Lakeside Beach for a swim.

It’s not a supervised beach with lifeguards, but the family had been branching out to some lesser-known locations, said Bryniarska, who is originally from Poland. This was their second time at Lakeside, just east of Crowbush Cove. 

“We were trying to explore and we were pretty happy with this discovery,” she said on Tuesday. “Now, it is a gorgeous beach, but the problem is I don’t have the background, not being from here, to know what to look for in terms of potential risks.”

Bryniarska said the water looked no different than the last time she’d been there, possibly even “less chaotic” than the previous visit, given the way the waves were moving. So she sat down to send a message on her phone while her kids went into the water, planning to join them in a bit.  

“I put my phone down in the holder on my chair and I looked up — and all of a sudden, the kids seemed just way further out than I thought they might be, and immediately something kind of wasn’t right to me.”

‘Swept out quickly’

At that point, Maya and Léo still seemed to be having fun. They tend to swim a bit further out at beaches, as a rule. But the pair soon realized they had gone further than usual.

“The more we swam away from the beach, the more I noticed… we are being, like, swept out quickly, and more quickly than… we’re actually swimming,” said Maya.

That’s when she looked back and noticed how far from the beach they were. The sister and brother decided to start to swim back to shore, but within minutes, they realized they hadn’t gotten anywhere.

“I swim quickly, and the fact I wasn’t moving meant that the waves are strong enough to just, like, hold me in place,” said Maya. 

Maya said her brother was facing upwards, trying to breathe.

“I reached my hand out to my brother and he grabbed it… and I realized, ‘This is the part where I hold him up. Why is it so hard to hold him up?'” she said.

Feeling “kind of useless,” she soon realized: “I can’t really do anything. And I’m dragging myself down as well.”

That’s when Maya decided she had to let go of Léo’s hand, in order to try to attract help for him. Otherwise, she was thinking, both of them would drown.

“So I left him. I went to swim as fast as I could on top of the waves.”

That’s when Maya saw her “ray of hope,” a man in the water, and she started screaming out for help over the roar of the crashing waves.

Léo said he was almost close to giving up by then: “I couldn’t move. And then I heard someone’s voice, so I was like, ‘I might be saved.'”

As the man went to help her brother, Maya was relieved, though quickly she remembered she needed to get back to shore as well.

Mother trying to help nearly sucked under

Meanwhile, Bryniarska had heard the commotion and rushed into the water to help her kids. Soon she too was in a dangerous situation, though she could see that Léo had gotten help.

“Only when I knew they were safe did I realize that I was feeling myself being literally sucked under,” Bryniarska said.

She screamed to attract attention and was trying to swim parallel to the shore, following the advice for dealing with a rip current. Luckily, help was at hand. 

You start to realize, ‘Oh, this is really serious for everybody here.’– Jim Soutar

Jim Soutar and Amanda Hamel were among the beachgoers who dove in to save the family and get them safely back to shore.

“There was a point, though, where the crashing waves coming in… we were tired from trying to fight through them,” Soutar recalled in an interview on Tuesday.

“You get to a point where the waves are crashing [and] you get a couple gulps of sea water, and you start to realize, ‘Oh, this is really serious for everybody here.'”

Hamel said there were several other swimmers in the water who had to be helped back to shore. 

More help was arriving in the meantime in the form of Island EMS personnel and firefighters.

An exhausted Bryniarska and her family were offered the chance to leave the area by ambulance. After their vital signs were checked, though, they decided to decline.

Bryniarska has now turned her thoughts to preventing other families from getting into trouble at unsupervised beaches.

“I think signage is good, maybe a public awareness campaign in general,” she said. 

She also thinks information could be handed out at the airport to help tourists and other newcomers to the Island, especially people unfamiliar with ocean tides and currents.