Teen lifeguard saves man from North Saskatchewan River near Devon

An 18-year-old Leduc lifeguard is thankful she was in the right place at the right time to help prevent a drowning.

Rebecka Blackburn was with her mother and her mother’s friends Wednesday night near the Devon boat launch. The group was out enjoying the sun when they noticed a man in his late 20s in the North Saskatchewan River.

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“I just saw him in the middle of the river. He was flailing his arms, splashing awkwardly,” she said.

“I said to my mom: ‘Hey, do you think that guy is okay?’ She said: ‘I’m not sure.’ His buddies were next to us laughing at him. We thought it was a joke.”

But moments later, the situation suddenly turned more serious.

“We noticed he started waving his hands and we heard him yell, ‘Help,’” she said.

Blackburn has been a lifeguard for three years, spending time at the Devon Pool and the Leduc Recreation Centre; she also swam competitively for eight years. The teen describes her swimming abilities as “very strong and very well-trained.”

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She, a friend of her mother and a friend of the man started to swim out to the middle of the river.

“One of his buddies… he admitted he wasn’t the greatest swimmer. I was like, ‘You stay here, I’m going out.’ I beat them to him but I would say it was about 75 metres trying to go diagonal across the river,” Blackburn said, adding she only put herself in the situation because she felt that she had been trained enough.

“I swam head-up front crawl like I had been trained to do, keeping my eye on the victim the entire time. I saw him bobbing up and down.

“When I got to him, I was about five feet away, I noticed he went underwater and I said, ‘Oh my gosh, here we go.’

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Blackburn and her mother’s friend were able to bring the man to shore, where he regained his breath. She stressed to the man that he should go to the hospital in case of secondary drowning though she is unsure whether he heeded her advice.

READ MORE: What parents need to know about secondary drowning

She calls the incident “overwhelming.”

“I want to stress the current was so strong that I felt so weak and attacked by the current that I could barely make it out to him.

“It just goes to show that no matter how strong of a swimmer you are, how confident you are in your swimming skills, you can never underestimate the current and the strength of it.”

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Her advice to swimmers? Never go out alone, don’t push yourself and don’t put yourself at risk.

As for whether she considers herself a hero, Blackburn, who said this is her first open-water rescue, shrugs off the suggestion, adding she was just doing her job.