How a Pink Rescue Buoy Saved a Holiday from Tragedy

On their last day of holiday at Brenton-on-Sea, the van Eck family walked down to the beach for one last, lazy day beside the ocean, unaware of how close they would come to losing everything. By that afternoon, a father and daughter would be lying exhausted on the sand, alive only because a stranger called Innocent had sprinted for a Pink Rescue Buoy and swam straight into danger to reach them.

One last swim

The day had been perfect: sunshine, warm sand and three sisters playing in the surf while their parents watched from the beach. Leyla, who usually gets cold first, had already come out of the water when suddenly she said, “Dad, I think Nina is struggling to get out.”

Chris looked up and saw his eldest daughter caught in a rip current, a wave having lifted her off the sandbank. He had always taught his daughters not to fight a current but to swim sideways out of it. Nina tried exactly that, but she couldn’t escape.

Chris waded in as far as he could, shouting instructions, and watched panic begin to show on her face as waves crashed over her. In that moment, he realised he had to choose: “Was I going to stand on the beach and watch my child drown, or was I going into the water to try to get her out?”

He swam to her. The two were lifted by waves and sucked back into the current repeatedly until they were completely exhausted. “All we could do was keep our heads above water,” he recalls.

Out in the rip, the sea felt utterly transformed. “The sea you usually sit beside calmly, admiring the beauty of the breaking waves – that same sea, when you are trapped in it, feels as if every single wave wants to kill you,” Chris says. As his strength faded, he prayed they would not cramp, knowing that if either of them did, “that would be the end of us”.

A stranger with a Pink Rescue Buoy

Back on the beach, sand sculptor Londokuhle Innocent Zungu was working when he heard shouting and saw people waving frantically offshore. “I saw people were stuck. They got caught by the rip,” he says.

Innocent ran down the beach, grabbed the Pink Rescue Buoy from its stand and sprinted full tilt along the sand before stripping off his clothes, throwing his phone aside and diving into the surf.

He swam straight into the rip, letting it pull him faster towards Chris and Nina. When he reached them, he saw Chris further out than Nina and heard him shouting, “Save the girl, save the girl.”

Innocent hesitated for a split second. “If I pull the girl out first, I’m not going to be able to catch him,” he thought. But he knew they both needed flotation, immediately.

He pushed the buoy to Nina first, then swam to Chris so that both could hold on. Chris describes the moment his hand closed around the Pink Rescue Buoy: “An incredible calmness came over me. As long as we could float, we would be okay.”

The current was too strong for all three of them to cling to the buoy together. “Somebody had to let go,” Innocent says. “So I let go and floated.” He focused on keeping them calm. “The current is going to take us out, but we just have to play cool. We have to relax. Don’t panic. Don’t fight it,” he recalls telling them.

Back to the sand

For nearly twenty minutes, the three of them floated while the rip completed its slow, circular pull. When Innocent felt the current begin to bring them closer to the breaking waves, he knew it was time to act.

“Guys, please hold on tight to the pink buoy because I’m about to catch the wave now.”

He caught wave after wave, diving down to plant his feet on the sand and using each surge to drag them closer to shore. “At a certain stage, Innocent told Nina and I to start kicking. We kicked with everything we had left,” Chris says.

Nina was able to stand and walk out. Chris could not. “I haven’t been that tired in my whole life. They dragged me out onto the shore.”

Gratitude, faith and a Pink Rescue Buoy

As NSRI and paramedics took over on the beach and later in hospital, Chris began to grasp how narrowly his family had escaped tragedy. “If certain things didn’t happen in a certain way, this would have turned out completely different.”

“The first thing is those Pink Rescue Buoys,” he says. “If that wasn’t there, we wouldn’t be here today.” The second was “a bystander who knew what to do and was willing to help us”.

The next day, when the family found Innocent back at his sand sculptures to say thank you, he pointed to his sculpture of Jesus on the cross and told them, “It wasn’t me, it was Him.” Chris replied, “Thank you for allowing Him to use you to be an angel to us.”

For Nina, still processing the fear of that day, one thing is clear: she is “very grateful to Innocent, who saved us”, and grateful that her dad loves her enough to risk his own life for her.

For the van Eck family, a Pink Rescue Buoy on a wooden stairway at Brenton-on-Sea is no longer just a bright object on the beach. It is the reason a father and daughter came home together – and a reminder that flotation, courage and calm can turn a near-tragedy into a story of hope.

Watch Chris and Innocent recount their experience: ‘Good Samaritan Saves Father and Daughter Using Pink Rescue Buoy’.