A couple visiting San Diego are breathing a sigh of relief after lifeguards off Mission Beach pulled off a miraculous rescue over the weekend.
Alexis and Brandon were watching football on Sunday when Sadie, their 5-year-old black-lab mix bounded out the front door, who knows where. Luckily, Sadie had an AirTag on her collar and her owners tracked her down to Ocean Beach, a couple of miles away. While Alexis and Brandon were headed there, lifeguards at Tower 2 got a report from surfers that a dog — Sadie — had gone down the jetty and was swept out by a rip current.
“Unit 100, I just had a surfer run up to the truck,” a lifeguard from Tower 2 radioed in. “He’s saying there’s a dog that’s on the jetty.”
“The dog was in the Mission Bay channel and got swept out with the current of the channel,” rescuer Garrett Smerdon said afterward. “It was a unique thing that I, personally, have never experienced.
Searchers with the Coast Guard and lifeguard came up empty initially.
“We looked for an hour,” said Jack Alldredge, the other half of the Jet Ski team that pulled Sadie to safety at about 2 p.m. “He let me know, you know: ‘We’re going to look for 10 more minutes…’. At that point, I kind of just said, like, ‘Please let us find this dog.’ “
“We kind of huddled up and said that, ‘You know, there’s a good chance that Sadie is still alive,’ ” Smerdon said. “Just a 5-year-old lab, and they’re fighters.”
“Yeah, they’re water dogs,” Alldredge concurred.
Then, as the lifeguards were headed back empty-handed, Sadie’s luck turned when Jet Ski 2 spotted her. The pair was about three-quarters of a mile offshore when Alldredge saw something, a miracle when you consider how much they had to work with: The snout of a black dog popping up between the waves.
Smerdon and Alldredge sped to Sadie and managed to get her up on the back of the Jet Ski before she sank beneath the surface. They then returned her to shore, where a grateful Alexis and Brandon awaited.
“We realized it was her, and we were pretty excited,” Alldredge said.
“She was super happy to see us,” Smerdon said. “She was tired.”
Video of Sadie on the boat shows her looking just, well, freaked out and sad, not to mention cold, with her huddling under a blanket.
“A lotta dumb luck and a little bit of common sense helped us find Sadie,” Smerdon said on Tuesday at a news conference on the beach.
By the time Sadie reunited with Brandon and Alexis, the dog had rebounded a bit.
“She’s the reason we’re forever grateful to the lifeguards of the San Diego Fire Rescue,” Alexis said. “Right when they were gonna call it off because it had been an hour, we were literally standing right there with the guy, and he got a call on the walkie-talkie saying they had found the dog, and we kind of just held our breath. And they were like, ‘and the dog is alive.’ And we kind of just started crying right away.”
Asked at the conclusion of Tuesday’s news conference if there was anything to add to their statements, Smerdon only said, “Go, Padres,” a sentiment quickly echoed by his partner, Alldredge.
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