After a morning spent running a 10K and snorkeling, 20-year-old Canadian visitor Kelsey Marks was finally ready to relax on the afternoon of Jan. 24.

She had grabbed a book and settled into a lounge chair by the pool of the Wailea Ekahi Village — her grandfather’s winter getaway — when cries of distress came from the beach nearby. Marks stood up and spotted a woman struggling in the surf a little over 50 yards out, just past an outcropping of lava rocks.

A trained lifeguard and synchronized swimmer, Marks’ first instinct was to race to the woman’s aid. She darted onto the beach, telling people to call 911 as she ran and jumped into the water behind another good Samaritan, who was carrying one of the yellow rescue tubes placed along the beach.

Marks and the man battled high waves and a strong riptide to reach the distressed swimmer, who was on her back and unable to roll over. The pair worked together — Marks put the woman’s arm on the rescue tube and held her head and shoulders above the water, while the man swam against the riptide and used the tube tether to pull them away from the rocks.

“I was mostly focused on keeping her airway up because I think she swallowed a lot of water,” said Marks, who went underwater at times as large waves rolled over them. “I was also just thinking about how much longer it would take to get her back to shore as we were becoming dangerously close to the rocks.”

The three finally escaped the riptide, and bystanders rushed to pull the woman to safety. No sooner was the woman on shore than another person shouted that someone else was in trouble. Marks and the man dashed back out and used the rescue tube to pull the exhausted man back to shore. Meanwhile, first responders arrived on scene to give oxygen to the dazed woman and use personal watercraft to rescue others caught in the riptide.

Marks believes she and her unidentified partner could not have made the rescues without the tube.

“As a lifeguard, we are trained to always have an aid because it doesn’t matter how good of a swimmer you are. The ocean will always be stronger,” Marks said via email from Melbourne, Australia, where she attends college. “The aid helped as I was carrying all the woman’s weight, and without it, I wouldn’t (have) been strong enough to lift me and her out of the water.”

The Tube Movement

Since they installed 40 rescue tubes along South Maui beaches last year, members of the Rotary Club of Kihei-Wailea have mostly relied on word of mouth to learn about tube-assisted rescues.

The first reported save using the South Maui tubes took place Dec. 29 at Keawakapu Beach. That incident and the Jan. 24 rescues in front of Wailea Ekahi Village are encouraging signs to club President John Moore.

“We’re happy that they’re working, but we’re not happy that they’re having to be used,” Moore said. 

With the help of now-retired Ocean Safety Battalion Chief Colin Yamamoto, the club spent about two years working out an agreement with the county to install the tubes in response to increased drownings. Early last year, the county granted the club permission to place the tubes every 300 feet, starting at Kalama Beach Park’s north end down to Keawakapu Beach. Maui has nine lifeguarded beaches in South Maui, according to hawaiibeachsafety.com, including Kamaole Beach Parks I, II and III and Makena State Park.

Moore emphasized that the tubes “are in no way meant to replace lifeguards.”

“Absolutely not,” he said. “We as a Rotary Club are 100 percent behind the lifeguards. This is just merely something to supplement the areas where there are no lifeguards.”

The bright yellow foam tubes are about 50 inches long with a tether that can drape across the rescuer’s shoulder while he or she swims. They can keep three adults afloat and cost $130 each with the mounting equipment and shipping.

The Rotary Club installed 28 tubes on May 27 and 12 tubes on June 24, Moore said. Two weeks ago, it put in three more at Polo Beach, and the Wailea Community Association also has asked the club to install 14 tubes in to-be-determined locations, likely somewhere between the Andaz Maui at Wailea Resort and the Fairmont Kea Lani, Maui.

So far, 86 tubes have been installed countywide, with Lanai looking to add four more in the future, Yamamoto said. Local associations and clubs are taking the lead and funding the efforts themselves.

The Kaanapali Operations Association has installed 30 tubes along 3 miles of Kaanapali coastline and has planned to add 30 more. Three west side Rotary clubs and one on the north shore also hope to install some in their districts.

Rescue statistics can be hard to track because they depend on word of mouth. Yamamoto doesn’t know how many have gone unreported, but he knew of five saves in addition to the Jan. 24 incident at Wailea Ekahi. 

A couple of years ago, the president of Hawaiian Hotels and Resorts, Tom Bell, happened to witness a man and two boys use the tubes to save a young tourist north of Black Rock at the pier.

On Dec. 29, the wife of a Kihei-Wailea Rotary Club member was at Keawakapu Beach when a California visitor leaped into the ocean to save an 8-year-old girl using a tube, Moore said. As for Marks’ rescue on Jan. 24, Moore heard about it through her grandfather, Bill Andrew, a Canadian Rotarian who spends his winters on Maui.

Rescue tubes have spread across the islands since Kauai residents started installing them on remote beaches in 2008.

“A local concerned citizen named John Tyler hung a rescue tube on a branch at a very remote beach where someone had just drowned,” said Dr. Monty Downs, president of the Kauai Lifeguard Association and an emergency room doctor at Wilcox Medical Center in Lihue. “Sure enough, within a couple of weeks, someone else got pulled out to sea there, a Samaritan grabbed the rescue tube and swam out to the victim and saved his life.”

Downs and some Rotarians made it their mission to install more rescue tube stations. Kauai has nine guarded beaches and at least 55 unguarded ones, many out of cellphone range. Rotarians John Gillen and Branch Lotspeich started the Rescue Tube Foundation, which has now placed 500 tube stations on beaches across Hawaii and the Mainland. A decade after the tubes first went up, Kauai has 240 tube stations and 87 documented “rescue tube deployments.”

From 2007 to 2016, Kauai had 76 ocean drownings, and state Department of Health data show “no clear trend” upward or downward since the tubes were installed. However, Downs said he reviewed the rescue tube incidents and estimated that the island would have suffered at least two dozen more drownings without the program.

Another statistic may shed some light on how the tubes are working: Since 2008, Kauai has yet to suffer a double drowning, Yamamoto said.

“The great thing about (rescue tubes) is it prevents double drownings,” he explained. “Imagine the dilemma faced by adult family members when their child is in trouble caught in a rip current or falling into the ocean from a rocky shoreline. All too often the adult parent cannot wait for 911 rescuers to arrive, so (he or she) goes into the ocean and ends up drowning with or without their child.”

Maui County had 171 drownings from 2007 to 2016. Drownings were on the rise between 2009 and 2015, which spurred the rescue tube initiative on Maui.

With the devices becoming more popular statewide, lawmakers are considering a measure (Senate Bill 2087) that would exempt from liability people who save others using rescue tubes and those with rescue tubes along their beachfront property. Yamamoto, Downs and lawmakers hope it will reduce the fear of litigation and make more tubes available.

“I have no knowledge of the particulars of the drownings that have recently and tragically occurred on Maui, and I have no idea whether or not a well-stationed rescue tube would have changed any one (or more) of the outcomes,” Downs said. “All I can tell you is that here on Kauai, we’ve been blessed to have had some would-be drownings averted because of this program.”

Buying Time

As of Thursday, there have been 12 ocean deaths — seven in South Maui, three in West Maui and one in East Maui on the Puka Maui trail — on Maui this year. Looking back on the recent drownings, Fire Services Chief Edward Taomoto said he doesn’t think a rescue tube would’ve helped “because the persons were found facedown, unresponsive already.” The tubes are “designed to assist the person who is still viable.”

But could well-meaning beachgoers put themselves at risk by jumping into the ocean to save distressed swimmers? Both officials and information provided with the tubes discourage people who aren’t strong swimmers from doing so.

“If they don’t feel comfortable, obviously they shouldn’t go out and put themselves in an unknown situation,” Taomoto said.

Moore pointed out that people can still help by calling 911 and reporting the three-digit number on the rescue tube pole that corresponds to GPS coordinates at the call center.

Each rescue tube comes with printed instructions, reminding nonswimmers not to go into the water and telling people to call 911. Those who do attempt a rescue are instructed to pull the rescue tube behind them while swimming — using fins if possible — and to stay calm and kick across the current toward the shore. 

Would-be rescuers don’t necessarily have to haul distressed swimmers to shore; sometimes all the person needs is a flotation device to hang on to until first responders arrive.

“Exhaustion leads to drowning,” Taomoto said. “So if you can keep a person afloat, then you won’t get exhausted. You can hang on to that thing for an hour until someone arrives. Besides exhaustion, the other factor that will contribute to drowning is panic. . . . If you’re in rough water and you have something to hang on to, you feel a lot more comfortable.”

Another place Taomoto thinks the tubes could be useful is around the cliff areas where lots of tourists visit, such as Olivine Pools in Kahakuloa and the blowhole at Nakalele Point.

“We’ve had a number of visitors and residents drown because they got swept into the ocean by high surf, and they were not able to stay afloat long enough for rescuers to arrive,” Taomoto said. “So that would be the situation where this (rescue tubes) would be a perfect solution.”

Because of the remote locations, it can take 20 to 30 minutes for first responders to arrive.

“A person wouldn’t need to jump into the water,” Taomoto said. “All they would need to do is throw the person the flotation device, and then that person can just stay afloat, and if they can swim out to sea away from the shoreline, then that would put them in safer waters because they wouldn’t be at risk of smashing up into the rocks.”

The Rotary Club hopes to expand the tube project through South Maui. Awareness is growing, and the visitor channel that plays in hotels now has a segment teaching visitors about the tubes and how to use them.

“Hopefully, it can continue to help people, but hopefully it doesn’t need to,” Moore said. “It’s like buying insurance. You need to have it, but you hope you never use it.”

* Colleen Uechi can be reached at cuechi@mauinews.com.