Surfer Survives 10 Chilling Hours at Sea

Slipping off his surfboard, Jaren Coler awakened choking on seawater. His body erupted in spasms of coughing and then he vomited.

It was the third time he had thrown up. He was getting colder by the hour, starting to drift in and out of consciousness.

The shivering 16-year-old surfer from Camarillo recognized the signs of hypothermia.

“I didn’t think I was going to die until I started to fall asleep,” Jaren said Wednesday.

Sitting in the kitchen of his Camarillo home, the teenage surfer recounted how a quick after-school surf outing turned into a 10-hour ordeal during Tuesday night’s storm--with Jaren bobbing helplessly beyond the breakers off Pitas Point north of Ventura.

He could see the flashlight beams of crews searching the rock-strewn shoreline off Faria Beach.

At first he couldn’t paddle in, defeated by rip currents that swept him far out to sea. Later, he decided to wait, hoping the monstrous surf would calm so he could make a successful landing on the rocky shoreline.

*

But waves of fear began to wash over him when a Coast Guard boat disappeared. It had come within 200 feet on several passes and seemed to shine a spotlight on his face.

“I decided if I was going to die, I should die trying to get in, rather than just stay out there,” he said.

The Tuesday surf session began about 4 p.m., when Jaren and three friends from Camarillo High School drove up the coast on the promise of big waves--a welcome change to this fall’s unusually poor surf.

The foursome slipped into the gated community of Faria Beach, using an access code to trigger the gate. After wriggling into their wetsuits, only Jaren and another friend, Jesse Kuhn, decided to paddle out into the breakers. One made a brief attempt to bodysurf, another stayed on shore.

*

The waves did not appear that big from the beach, Jaren said. But once in the water, Jaren and Jesse, soon faced a set of huge waves, each one breaking out farther than the next.

Jesse, a more experienced surfer, decided to call it quits and headed back to shore. Jaren plunged ahead, duck-diving under each advancing wall of whitewater with his 6-foot-1-inch board.

As soon as he made it past the breakers and caught his breath, he looked back at his friends on the shore.

“I started to paddle in and the current sucked me out,” he said. “It seemed like I was going backward.”

The current soon swept him hundreds of yards out to sea. He waved helplessly to his buddies.

“It was getting darker and darker and we could hardly see him,” said Chris Cohea, 17, of Camarillo. Chris and Jesse called 911, the Coast Guard and Jesse’s father.

Soon Jaren’s parents and friends and neighbors converged on Faria Beach, joining county Sheriff’s Department deputies and the sheriff’s volunteer search and rescue team.

*

Faria Beach residents joined in the search. They turned on their deck lights to brighten the beachfront. They loaned jackets to Jaren’s friends and supplied them and others in the search party with hot cocoa.

Jaren’s father, Doug Coler, was worried sick. He clambered on the rocks to look for a sign of his only son, until sheriff’s deputies persuaded him to wait inside their mobile command center, a revamped motor home.

“I was really worried he had a bad wave and hit his head on the board,” Coler said. “As time went by, and there were no board fragments, I felt more confident . . . He’s a strong kid.”

The Coler family was particularly frustrated because the rainstorm made it too dangerous for a Coast Guard rescue helicopter from Long Beach to join in the search. And the weather kept a sheriff’s helicopter grounded at the Camarillo Airport.

The Coast Guard’s 44-foot boat and the search party on land concentrated on the coastline south of Faria. They judged that to be the most likely place to find Jaren, given the predominant side-shore current than runs down the coast.

But Jaren had been swept farther out to sea and was picked up by a countercurrent that took him a couple of miles up the coastline to another surf spot off of Hobson County Park.

Remembering what he had learned about currents in his high school oceanography class, he paddled in toward shore and rode the southerly current back down the coastline to Faria Beach.

Meanwhile, the surf continued to mount and he kept outside of the breakers to avoid getting slammed onto the rocks or up against the concrete sea walls that protect Old Rincon Highway and its million-dollar, oceanfront homes.

Jaren could see the search parties on the beach and thought he spotted his dad on the rock sea wall at Faria County Park. He tried yelling. But his voice was lost in the roar of the surf, the wind and the rain.

“For a while, I was waiting to see if the waves would die down,” he said. “But it kept getting bigger all night.”

Jaren’s wetsuit kept him fairly warm during the first few hours, that and paddling against the current. But he grew tired and hungry.

“I started to hallucinate about hamburgers, I was so hungry,” he said.

Unlike most people, Jaren said he is not afraid of swimming in the ocean after dark. After all, he had done some night surfing off Carpinteria Beach and next to the Ventura County fairgrounds, when the lights from the county fair illuminated the waterfront.

But neither of these night surf sessions had towering 10-foot waves that would challenge the best of surfers during the daylight. Jaren considers himself an average surfer, with four years of experience.

“I was calm pretty much of the time,” he said. Jaren tried to amuse himself by drawing designs in the ocean’s surface.

The water had a red tide, caused by reddish algae that glow at night. Each swirl of water left a discernible trail.

“When a fish would go by, they would leave a blue trail,” he said. “That kept me entertained.”

Later, he saw a really big fish and then a fin break the water. He instinctively lifted his legs, to keep them from dangling in the water.

“When I saw the fin, it looked like a shark. My mind started playing tricks on me.”

It turned out to be a dolphin. Two of the marine mammals came by to check him out, before swimming off into the darkness.

“The birds were circling around me the whole time I was out there, too,” he said. Pelicans and sea gulls landed and would float nearby. He could not decide if they were being friendly or had a more malicious intent.

“They were like vultures. I would yell at them, ‘Get out of here!’ ” They would fly off and then venture back slowly.

Jaren took heart when he saw the Coast Guard boat making sweeps, shining three spotlights into the dark sea. Five times, he said, the boat came within 200 feet of him, with search lights reaching in his direction.

Wearing a red and black wetsuit, Jaren knew he would not be easily spotted. So he tried treading water, holding his white surfboard over his head to catch their attention.

As the Coast Guard boat disappeared from sight, he grew truly scared. He was tired. He was growing colder. His arms were sore.

*

“I would fall asleep and fall off my board and wake up breathing water and get sick,” he said. After getting sick three times, his stomach had nothing left to discharge. He started shivering uncontrollably. And he sensed his time was running out.

He decided to take his chances in the surf.

Jaren said he put his head down and began to paddle as furiously as his rubbery arms would allow him. What he did not know was that he was coming ashore during high tide, when the surf was at its peak.

The wave sneaked up behind him. He did not see it until it crashed on top of him, buckling his surfboard.

Jaren wrapped his arms around the board and held tight, he said. It seemed as if he was under water a long time. The next thing he knew, he had washed ashore on the rocky beach, near where he entered the water.

He scampered up a set of concrete steps cut into the sea wall with a wave breaking on his heels. Jaren slipped through the patio area of one of the houses, went down a private street and scaled a fence to reach a pay phone outside the gated community.

Using a credit card number committed to memory, he called home to get his dad to pick him up. No big deal, he thought.

*

“Where’s dad?” he asked his sisters. “Where are you?” they demanded in unison. Melissa, 18, and Becky, 14, had each picked up a phone extension. They were in charge of handling the phones at home during the 10-hour search.

“I thought I had been out there a couple of hours and they said it was 2:30 in the morning. I said, ‘No way.’ ”

He explained his location by the side of the road and lay down to wait.

And promptly passed out.

Doug and Cheri Coler were soon at their son’s side, as were rescue workers and friends who helped with the search.

Neighbors Mark and Ruth Custance brought Jaren a couple of ham and cheese sandwiches, which he promptly wolfed down.

Mark Custance, a former lifeguard, had spent much of the night with rescue workers when the chances of a happy ending had appeared slim.

On Wednesday, he recalled the words of one astonished searcher when Jaren had made it safely back to land:

“It never ends like this.”