SOUTH LAGUNA : Friend Tells How Woman Drowned

One minute, Lynn Scollard was climbing the rocks with her friend John Griffin and marveling over how beautiful the ocean looked.

The next, she was gone.

As the two were climbing down an eight-foot-high rock above a tide pool at Three Arch Bay on Sunday, another climber yelled: “Take cover! Here comes a big one!,” Griffin, 22, recalled Monday, a day after Scollard drowned. “The last thing I said to her was, ‘Lynn, baby, hold on tight.’ ”

The huge wave was one of many in a day of high surf that prompted hundreds of successful rescues along the Orange County coast. It knocked Scollard and Griffin off the rock and into a trench about 1 1/2 feet wide, he said.

Griffin was able to climb out, but as he tried to reach his friend, “there was another big gush,” he said. “All the water just sucked her out to sea from the trench. It was so quick, there was nothing I could do.”

Scollard’s body was recovered some 40 minutes later.

Scollard, 30, of Huntington Beach, worked at a local mechanics shop, and she loved hiking, camping, dirt bike riding and other outdoor activities, family members and friends said. She became the second Orange County beach-drowning victim of the year and the first of the summer season.

There were seven beach drownings in 1989, six in 1988 and four in 1987. The coroner’s office does not yet have figures for 1990.

Griffin said he saw a “No Trespassing” sign about an eighth of a mile from where the accident occurred, but, he said, “we didn’t really pay attention to it.”

He does not blame anyone for the accident, he said.

However, the private lifeguard firm that patrols the beach responded Monday to criticism Monday over its handling of the area.

Some critics said that the death could have been avoided had there been signs and verbal warnings from the lifeguard about the treachery of the rocks and surf.

Paul Grosfeld, who spent the day at the beach on Sunday, said he watched a group of people venture out on the craggy shoreline to the remote cave and disappear to the other side.

“I told (the lifeguard), ‘Do you have a radio?’ ” Grosfeld said, “because I knew these people were in trouble. If I was the lifeguard, I wouldn’t have let them go out there.”

Michael Gaughan, director of U.S. Ocean Safety, a company that operates lifeguard services at the beach, said that the lifeguard on duty Sunday, who was not identified, is one of the company’s best.

Gaughan said that by the time Scollard was climbing the rocks, the tide was rolling in, meaning that the two had no safe way to get back to the beach.

Gaughan acknowledged that there are no signs posted at the edge of the rocks warning of the dangers of climbing on them, but he did say that one will be posted.

“We are going to see what we can do to improve the situation,” Gaughan said. “We hope some good can come out of this.”

Gaughan added that all the beaches in the area had posted red or yellow flags Sunday warning people of the heavy surf. He did not know which color flag was posted at the 10th Street beach or whether lifeguards gave verbal warnings to rock-climbers there.