A surfer who helped rescue a family caught in a riptide wants more people to be aware of basic water safety. Chris Penn, from Wymondham, Norfolk, was visiting the beach at Sea Palling when he helped rescue a man who had got into difficulty. The drama when members of a family got caught in a rip tide.
"I thought, 'If I don’t do something, this guy is going to die right in front of us'...
I'm a surfer, I’ve been trained in lifesaving," Mr Penn said. "I heard all this commotion and shouting. I could see people gathering on the beach down by the water and quickly realised what was going on.
"I could see three people in the water in difficulty and that instinct took over. "No-one was going into the water, [so] I started running down to the beach." Mr Penn, 39, whose mum was a swimming teacher, spends a lot of time at the beach.
He said that on the day of the incident, the sea looked "deceptively calm". Emergency services were called to the beach at about 10:30 BST. Coastguard teams from Bacton and Cromer, Sea Palling Independent Lifeboat and Sea Palling RNLI lifeguards responded.
The East Anglian Air Ambulance and the East of England Ambulance Service also attended, and one person was taken to James Paget Hospital, Gorleston. After the incident, Mark Skerrett, chairman of Sea Palling Independent Lifeboat, warned of the risks of rip tides around high tide in the area. "It is a beautiful beach and safe most of the time, but the rip tides along our coast are one of the dangers," .