When Emily Churchill heard a panicked scream while enjoying a day at the beach with her friend, she says, “instincts took over.”
It’s a good thing it did because, in seconds, a 12-year-old had been pulled out to sea by a powerful rip current.
“I noticed a head out in the water, which was getting pulled out very quickly. When I saw her moving out further and faster, I started running as quickly as I could,” Churchill says.
Churchill is the nurse behind the brave rescue Global News reported happened last Wednesday at Conrad Beach, just over half an hour east of Halifax.
Twelve-year-old Fiona Poulin was at the beach that day with her friend and friend’s mom and the girls had been getting out of the water when she was hit by a large wave that pulled her into the rip current and carried her out to sea.
Churchill, an off-duty nurse, ran into the water without hesitating to help the young swimmer struggling to get back to shore and keep her head above water.
“The waves were very strong and were bigger than I was expecting. I was trying to keep my footing on the bottom as much as possible, but there’s so much seaweed out there, so I was just trying to get to her, calling out to her, yelling her name,” Churchill recalls.
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“By the time I got to her, we just reached out to each other, pulled each other in, and I told her, ‘You’re doing so well. You did so good. We’re going to get you back.’”
Churchill says she had Fiona flip on her back, and the two started trying to swim diagonally back to shore.
“There was only one really big wave that got to us when we were on our way back in, and it took us under really firmly, like, it sent us both straight down to the bottom, and I was able to dig my feet in to hold us steady in that position,” Churchill says.
Churchill says she was able to navigate them safely back to shore.
Despite having worked as a lifeguard in the past, the nurses say this was her first time having to rescue someone, but she says her past training and surfing experience just took over.
“Nerves and adrenaline. Am I getting to her fast enough? When I get to her, can I bring her back?” she says when talking about what was going through her mind at the time.
Fiona’s mom, Sarah, and her mom’s friend Emily Bolhuis have both declared Churchill a hero, but that is not how she would describe herself.
“I don’t think of myself as a hero. I’m just somebody who jumped into action,” Churchill says.
Following this experience, Churchill says she would like to see warning signs posted about the danger of rip currents so swimmers know how to spot them and what to do if caught in one.