Call of Car Stuck in Surf Proves a Little Exaggerated

The urgent call came in to police just before 7 a.m.: A heavily damaged pink Corvette was stranded along the Seal Beach Pier, being pounded by the morning surf. Someone might be trapped inside.

Officers raced to the beach, prepared to rescue the driver. They scoured the coastline but found nothing.

A dispatcher contacted the Seal Way resident who had alerted police. But he continued to insist that he could see the damaged Corvette on the beach. Mystified, police went to his house.

From there, it wasn’t hard to crack the case. The man had just purchased a new high-powered telescope. What he was seeing was a smashed-up Barbie-sized toy Corvette, less than a foot long, which police later recovered.

Apparently, the man was still learning to use the gadget and hadn’t quite gotten used to its strength.

The Nov. 3 incident has been good for some chuckles around the station, Sgt. Rick Ransdell said.

“Had he panned his telescope up a little from the ocean, or if a fish would’ve come by, he would’ve realized what he was looking at,” Ransdell said. “Of course, then we’d have had a report of a whale swimming up.”