Surfer’s Night at Sea Rescues Couple’s Love

As rain pelted the surrounding 12-foot waves, Jens Eventyr curled up on his surfboard and allowed himself to think the unthinkable: He was going to die.

Hours earlier, the 32-year old surfer felt the shoreline -- and hope -- slip away as strong currents swept him out to sea.

“I am going to die a slow, torturous death and be in misery until I fade away ...,” he thought. “Maybe it would be better if I could just have a quick death.”

His ordeal started March 19 after about an hour and a half of surfing off the rugged Pacific Coast. With the sun sinking in the west, Eventyr was ready to call it a day and headed for shore. But the strong ocean currents weren’t cooperating.

“It was like I was falling, and there was this hand reaching out to me and I was just almost there,” but he never could reach the beach he was heading for, he said.

Instead, three monstrous waves pulled him out to sea, away from the jetty as the sun disappeared and the sky turned inky black.

Eventyr had been looking for solitude: time to think about what had been a tense period for him and his wife, time to reflect. A surfer for five years, he had headed out alone to Westhaven State Park near Westport to surf off some stress.

His wife, Kirstin, stayed home in Olympia. As darkness set in and Jens didn’t come home, she began to worry. Had he checked into a hotel?

At 2 a.m., she called the Washington State Patrol to see if any accidents had been reported. At 4 a.m., she called Evergreen State College, where Eventyr works as a breakfast cook, to see if he’d shown up to work. He hadn’t.

“That was when I started to get really, really scared,” said Kirstin, a mental health counselor. “Because up until that moment I really thought he’d gotten a hotel room or he’d fallen asleep in his van.... I was maintaining a denial fantasy.”

In the water, Jens Eventyr could no longer see lights from the shore, and the massive waves were making him seasick.

And he thought about Kirstin. “I was going to die and we weren’t going to get a chance to resolve our issues.”

Between attempts at paddling toward shore, he conserved energy by resting with his chest on top of the 7 1/2-foot board and his legs tucked below. His gloves, boots and hooded wetsuit -- a recent birthday gift from his family -- helped preserve body heat in the 50-degree water.

He was losing hope and yet he also felt a knot in his stomach, a sense that his body was resisting surrender. His eyes closed, but he tried to fight off sleep.

At one point, as he opened his eyes, he caught a glimpse of dawn and felt the warmth of the sun.

“There was this moment where the clouds broke open and it looked like two hands,” he said. “And the sun was beaming through in golden beams.... “

The light of day found Kirstin in a panic. Authorities had found Eventyr’s van parked at the beach. His wetsuit and surfboard were missing. They called the Coast Guard.

Shortly before 8 a.m. March 20, the Coast Guard dispatched two helicopters and a boat to look for him.

Kirstin drove to Westport with a friend and Jens’ mother, while her father stayed home to monitor the phone. Seeing the turbulent surf, Kirstin felt “helpless and small” and collapsed to her knees, sobbing.

“There’s just no way he could survive that,” she thought.

As his wife wept in the sand, Jens Eventyr kept up his struggle against the sea just 18 miles to the north.

He was off the shoreline of the Quinalt Indian Reservation when he wondered if his eyes were playing tricks on him. He made out what appeared to be a little house. The closest land was a cliff jutting into the water. He headed toward it.

For hours, he paddled in short bursts. He seemed to be making progress.

“That was my first moment of hope,” he said.

Finally, with a firm grip on his board, he caught a wave and, in one last 10-second ride, was hurled onto the shore.

He lay on the sand awhile, gathering his strength before making the trek up the cliff toward the house. Weary, thirsty and famished after struggling with the sea for 18 hours, he stopped to rest, drink a trickle of water and scrounge for edible plants, including fiddlehead ferns.

The house turned out to be a shuttered Coast Guard station. But he was in luck: A young couple there gave him a ride to a store in the Indian reservation town. Clerk Lois Hetland said she didn’t know what to think when the obviously exhausted man in a wetsuit walked into her store. She guessed that he might be suffering from hypothermia, and she called paramedics.

“You’re lucky you’re alive,” she told him.

Coast Guard officials say Eventyr’s protective gear, made of heat-trapping Neoprene, helped keep him alive along a stretch of coast that is notorious for very strong currents.

“He had a strong will to live,” Petty Officer Clint Strayhorn said.

Kirstin had spent hours searching when she got the news that her husband had been found.

“They found him!” she shouted in joyous relief. Then for an instant she wasn’t sure and asked her father on the phone: “They found him, right? Him -- him, him, him, not just the body, right?”

Soon, Jens’ own voice on the phone confirmed it.

The couple declared their love for each other.

“We’re usually good at resolving things with each other,” Kirstin said. “And to come back to each other -- to have that option -- was just a miracle. That was part of what was going to kill me was that he could go under and not know how much I love him.”

Back at home last week, Jens had returned to work and was thinking about surfing again, although not alone. He and Kirstin have taken lots of walks together.

“It’s been really sweet,” Kirstin said. “There’s definitely an increased awareness of how precious we are to each other.”

Jens said he has a new appreciation for his wife of nearly seven years.

“I have a wonderful life and I really started to realize the value of people,” he said. “It shuffles the deck -- your priorities change, and it’s like a whole new start.”