Mysterious Floater

I have mentioned before in these dispatches my career as a lifeguard on the bay front and 15th Street, watching over Nancy, Billy, Dorothy and Peter while the mothers of Nancy, Billy, Dorothy and Peter played endless rubbers of bridge.

If being a baby sitter is thrilling, I had a thrilling job. However, I must admit that the career of baby-sitting is not considered as thrilling as, say, skydiving.

However, the excitement of my job as a lifeguard-baby sitter had to take second place to my career, also as a lifeguard, keeping track of the Floater.

The Floater was a rather rotund, middle-aged woman who came down to the beach each and every day. She would march across the beach, enter the water, take a half-dozen floundering strokes, then flop over on her back, stretch out her arms and legs, and float.

She didn’t float just to float. No, sir, my Floater was a traveling floater. She would get out into the current far enough to pick up the tide. If it was an incoming tide, she would float up toward the canneries. If it was an outgoing tide, she would float down toward the Newport Harbor Yacht Club.

There wasn’t too much thinking involved in baby-sitting, just counting the babies from time to time to see that no one had drowned or wandered away, so I spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about the Floater.

Because I was so busy being a baby sitter, I couldn’t leave my post and follow the lady, but there was a lifeguard at the adjoining campground, and I asked him about the Floater. He just shrugged and said that she floated out of his jurisdiction, and he didn’t know exactly where she landed.

I knew some people at the Newport Harbor Yacht Club and asked them if the Floater ever landed there. They said she floated right past their club, and the last thing they saw of her, she was floating under the White Bridge that led to Bay Island.

I came to no conclusions about the lady and was too bashful to ask her any questions. After all, there is no law against floating, and she wasn’t harming anyone.

And so I just kept on counting babies and pulling them out of the water. I listed every one of those incidents as a rescue and had a record of rescues never equaled in the history of the Newport Beach lifeguard service.

Yes, sir, being a lifeguard is an exciting job.

* ROBERT GARDNER was a Corona del Mar resident and a former judge who died earlier this year. This column originally ran in December 2000.

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