Photo: Brent Weldon //YouTube
Brent Weldon is a staple in the Wedge community. Whether he’s on land with his camera gear or swimming around the lineup himself, there’s rarely a south swell where we don’t see clips from the Orange County videographer.
Weldon released a film earlier this year that documented some of the most intense rescues and injuries he’d seen at his regular spot, featuring interviews with the surfers, bodyboarders, and photographers who’ve lived to talk about things like broken spines. Ironically, Weldon’s also found himself on the saving end of one of those Wedge rescues now. The ordeal went down while he was livestreaming one of his typical sessions from the beach and heard somebody yelling for help. The screams came from the wife of a bodyboarder, and rather than waiting for lifeguards to help, Brent jumped into action himself.
“His head was barely above the surface,” he remembers, having spotted the bodyboarder after his wife had alerted him. Weldon did call for a nearby lifeguard, but once he realized that the situation was more serious than he’d thought, coupled with the fact that other lifeguards were far away, he ran into the water to help. “I actually have footage on Surfline and you see me kind of prepare, but I’m like ‘You know what, I’d rather get out there, help him, and the lifeguards can kick me away and do their thing when they need to.’ So I just sprinted out there.”
The bodyboarder was fully conscious, but he was very panicked. Taking waves on the head at the Wedge isn’t like tumbling anywhere else. It’s not as simple as letting a couple waves simply wash you up to the sand. In the video below, Weldon walks through the exhaustion and the adrenaline from just a few minutes of helping a person in trouble in the Wedge impact zone and says it gave him new perspective on how difficult the job is for those lifeguards.
“Mad respect,” he said. “These lifeguards are doing this daily, which is just crazy. I can’t believe they do this daily and the salary they make is almost nothing, which is the worst part about it. These guys don’t make nearly enough for what they’re out there doing.”
