Off-Duty California Firefighters Rescue Kayaker

DANA POINT – Very faintly, Scott Schultz heard a voice through the darkness: “Help!”

He couldn’t see anything, so he asked his friend and boss, Mark Flores, if he’d heard it.

“Ah, you must be hearing things,” Schultz recalled Flores saying as the off-duty firefighters sat off Dana Point hoop-netting for lobster on Schultz’s boat.

Schultz, a 12-year veteran of the Orange County Fire Authority, always gets low marks for hearing in his regular checkups.

But he knew what he was hearing Saturday night. Schultz yelled to the next boat, 150 feet or so away, to ask if everyone there was OK. They were – and they hadn’t heard anyone calling for help.

Schultz turned on his boat’s 200,000-candlepower spotlight and swung it down the mile-long jetty. About 300 feet from his boat, he saw an empty green kayak.

Schultz and Flores, an OCFA captain whose 11-year-old son was aboard, quickly motored closer.

“We found the guy clinging to his kayak, and a dog was swimming circles around him,” Schultz said Monday.

The kayaker, Chris, had on a self-inflating life jacket that hadn’t worked.

His waders had filled with water, weighing him down, and he couldn’t get them off or climb back on his kayak with them on.

“He was panicked. He was scared, and he could only speak in, like, one- or two-word sentences,” Schultz said.

Flores secured the kayak and pulled Chris’ 20-pound dog onto the boat while Schultz talked Chris around to the back of the boat and pulled him in.

Chris said he’d been yelling for help for 30 minutes. Another half-hour in the 60-degree water and he might have died, Schultz said.

Schultz offered to call the Sheriff’s Department’s Harbor Patrol, but Chris declined. Schultz thinks Chris was worried he’d get in trouble for not having a whistle on his life jacket or flares.

Chris seemed OK, so Schultz and Flores didn’t press the point.

After half an hour of calming down, Chris got back in his kayak and went to collect his own hoops, which took half an hour or so.

Schultz and Flores told him to swing back by the boat before heading in, and he did.

They never got Chris’ last name, but he said he was from Dana Point.

Capt. Steve Concialdi, a fire authority spokesman, said Schultz and Flores went “above and beyond the call of duty.”