Dad hails nippers’ rescue feat after brush with death

A FATHER has praised a group of young nippers who rushed to rescue his stricken family in rough waters off a Victorian beach and says his family owes them their lives.

Bonbeach Life Saving Club nippers Elsie Zvara, Felicity Weston, Lachie Stacey, Isabelle Walterfang, Merlin Barnes, Max Reindel and Ryan Talbot with Art Pashchuk who they helped rescue. Picture: Ian Currie

A FATHER has praised a group of young nippers who rushed to rescue his stricken family in rough waters off a Victorian beach.

Art Pashchuk said if the teenage lifesavers were not training at Bonbeach on Friday night, he and wife Irena and their two sons, Daniel, 8, and Robert, 4, would have drowned.

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“We owe our lives to them,” Mr Pashchuk said.

“I’m obviously very grateful towards them all. It is a huge debt. I am thinking how can I repay them.”

Mr Pashchuk, 44, from Chelsea, had taken his family out paddle-boarding at the popular Peninsula beach, southeast of Melbourne, when his eldest son slipped off the board just after 7pm.

“Daniel could swim but he started panicking,” the father of two told the Sunday Herald Sun.

Strong currents made the 3.5m family-sized paddleboard hard to turn around, so Mr Pashchuk jumped in to save his son.

“I was afraid for him, so I said to my wife to stay with the board and I went to get him,” he said.

The next few minutes were harrowing, as when Mr Pashchuk reached his son, he went to return to the stand-up paddleboard and realised it was drifting further out to sea with his wife and youngest son aboard.

“We were trying to chase the board as it was going out but the current was too strong,” he said.

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Bonbeach Life Saving Club nippers Elsie Zvara, Felicity Weston, Lachie Stacey, Isabelle Walterfang, Merlin Barnes, Max Reindel and Ryan Talbot with Art Pashchuk who they helped rescue. Picture: Ian Currie

With Daniel clinging tightly around his neck, and now about 150m offshore, he tried to swim to shore.

When he reached a sandbar, he stood on his tiptoes to keep his and his son’s heads above water, then he stopped and screamed for help.

“First I was shouting ‘help, help’ but no one could hear me,” he said. “So I started waving my hat around.”

It was this move that Bonbeach Life Saving Club president Lloyd Thomas said caught their attention.

“One of the kids said he heard someone yell for help but it was hard to see him as we were looking out into the sun,” Mr Thomas said. “Then we saw this big round straw hat waving around and we jumped into action.”

A team of nippers, aged 14 to 15, grabbed boards and didn’t hesitate to jump into the water and make their way to Mr Paschuk.

Meanwhile, his wife, who feared the worst after losing sight of him and their son, had drifted some 700m away and used her mobile phone to raise the alarm with police.

Once Mr Paschuk and Daniel were safely back on the beach, Mr Thomas and senior lifesaver Brent Stacey raced out in an inflatable rescue boat to pluck Irena and Robert to safety.

Mr Thomas said the family was “very lucky” as another 30 minutes later and no one would have been there.

“This has been a terrible year for drownings across the state so it is nice to have a good news story,” he said.

But he said it highlighted how deadly the bay’s usually calm beaches could be.

“It’s important people realise just how dangerous beaches can be, even on a calm day,” he said. “Conditions can change quickly.”

He urged beachgoers to always swim on patrolled beaches.

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