Lake Oswego mom and child pulled from Kauai surf

By Kate Taylor

Calmness and the will to keep treading kept a Lake Oswego mother and daughter safe until they were rescued in Hawaii last week, when ocean currents pulled them hundreds of feet away from Kauai's Waiohai Beach.
Karen Bradley, 52, and her nine-year-old daughter were swimming with an air mattress and an inner tube at about 11 a.m. Friday while the rest of their family -- Gary Bradley and the couples' three-year-old daughter -- were playing in the sand. Someone had told them that the beach, which has no lifeguard, was a great place for kids.
Not so.
The waters off the beach often are subject to powerful South Shore currents that routinely drag swimmers far from where they want to be. Within an hour of the time they entered the warm water, a helicopter, jet ski and at least three lifeguards were on their way to the mother and daughters' aid.
Kauai Fire Department lifeguards -- summoned by a call from Gary Bradley, who noticed that his wife and daughter weren't getting any closer -- plucked them from the waves after clearing snorkelers from the area and enlisting the help of a helicopter for spotting and an emergency jet ski equipped with a passenger slit about 40 minutes after they entered the water, said Mary Daubert, Kaua'i County spokeswoman.
"I was feeling a lot of guilt about that," Karen Bradley said from her cozy Lake Oswego home today. "I've let it go, but it was hard. I was thinking 'I could have gotten her killed."
That can happen quite easily in Kauai, Hawaiian officials said.
"It's not really surprising when you're surrounded by the ocean, without any land masses nearby other than other islands, for there to be such currents," said Daubert said.
Hawaiians occasionally see tourists as well as residents pulled out into the ocean because, Daubert said, they're sometimes not familiar with the water. It's vital, she said, that swimmers don't exhaust themselves by trying to fight the current, but instead float with it until they're out of it and can swim to safety or be rescued.
While they were out in the water, Karen Bradley strove to keep herself calm, asking her daughter to look for fish and other spectacular things in the water. It was only when she returned to the beach that she realized she was badly shaken. A firetruck full of help and medics checked the mother and daughters' vitals, but both were fine.
The Kauai Fire Department Battalion Chief Shawn Hosaka on Wednesday praised the pair for their ability to stay calm for so long.
"Staying calm is number one," he said. "They did a good job, because, with children, they look at their parent, and if their parent is calm and collected, then they're ok. If the parent is panicking, then it's all over."