@ActionNewsJax
If I hosted a Peter Griffin-inspired ‘You Know What Grinds My Gears’ segment, the way stories like this are reported by smalltown media outlets would probably make the cut. “Riptide sucks Bossier man into Atlantic Ocean. He floated, scared, for 10 hours,” the Shreveport Times reported on Friday.
Trying my best to ignore my irritation with the misnomer “riptide” and the fact that media outlets hosted by people who don’t actually know what a rip current is, the idea that a walk on the beach can at any moment turn into a fight for your life by being “sucked into the ocean” is always a hot ticket for local news shows this time of year. It doesn’t really work like that, obviously. The ocean doesn’t just come out of shin-high water, devour unassuming people who were just playing their uke against a bonfire, as some sacrifice to Great Whites and Poseidon. But of course, if you actually spend any time in or around the ocean — like 99.9% of the people who will read this — you know these things. You might even think the mental image is a funny one. Case in point:
That’s probably what the average person has in mind when they read a headline like that of Shreveport Louisiana’s Times. A handful of Google search results stories have more or less described what just happened to a tourist in Georgia. And maybe it’s even what 19-year-old Blake Spataro thought was happening to him when he found himself in the middle of the Atlantic during a family trip to Saint Simons Island.
Sensationalized headlines aside, Spataro actually said he was out for a swim one night, not just casually strolling along the beach as some stories have described, before he noticed he was a little further away from shore than he’d like. When Blake couldn’t make it back to shore on his own, and with nobody around to call out to for help, he ended up in the ocean for 10 hours. “I really did think that I was going to die out there,” he said in TV interviews about what he now calls “the worst vacation ever.” Lucky for Blake, he’s a better swimmer than he may have thought because he managed to tread and drift the rest of the night. Whenever he was too tired to tread, Blake would float on his back then go back to treading water again. He repeated that for hours, drifting three miles up the coast until the current had finally brought him back to shore. “I thought I was too young to die and I simply didn’t want it to end there.”
When Spataro noticed a light in the distance, he knew he was near land again. At that point, he put his feet down and realized he was actually in waist-high water…but still a solid 15-minute walk back to dry land. Rescue teams had been searching for him the entire time but in the end, he made it back to dry land on his own.
