In a video, you watch the power of a Lake Michigan rip current pulling two swimmers out of safety at Michigan City’s beach on Sunday, July 20 — then lifeguards swimming out to save them.
But it wasn’t the only example of lives spared from the most deadly of the Great Lakes that same weekend.
In a separate Facebook post, a lifeguard at New Buffalo’s beach recounts how he and fellow guards fought fierce currents, caused by the pier, to rescue about 13 people in two days.
Dave Benjamin, executive director of the Great Lakes Surf Rescue Project, narrates the video from Michigan City’s Washington Park beach, making it a tutorial on how things can go wrong.
He points out a rounded area where the waves rush onto shore further than the rest of the water. This is also where the water retreats the strongest, a clue as to where the rip current runs a straight-line channel out into the lake.
He uses a cursor to point out two people in that rip current. Their heads and bodies are tiny, best seen on a computer screen rather than a phone, but they make the point. In a couple of minutes, the current pulls them out.
Lifeguards enter the water and pull them to safety. Then guards order everyone out of the water.
Watch the video at https://youtu.be/DTCr-eWuUoA.
“These rescues usually go unnoticed with no Monday morning headlines of lives saved,” said Benjamin, who advocates that every public beach should have lifeguards. “But imagine the horrific headlines if we had seven fatalities at two beaches. Lifeguards are the greatest public safety asset every beach should have.”
Out of 42 drowning deaths in the five Great Lakes in 2025, 19 have been in Lake Michigan, his agency counted as of July 19.
The ‘longest day’ at New Buffalo beach
Benjamin trains the lifeguards at the New Buffalo beach. One of them, Aiden Tellez, wrote an account of an “insane” two days of rescues on July 20-21 on the Surf Rescue Project’s Facebook page. It was a lesson in how structures in the water, like piers, create a similarly treacherous “structural current.”
After guards rescued five people on July 20, the next day, July 21, proved to be “the longest day of work ever,” though also the “most rewarding,” according to Tellez, a college student from Bridgman who’s been a guard at the beach for four years.
Tellez helped a kid who was struggling by the pier’s rocks who was “getting pushed under and couldn’t move at all.” Tellez went in and extended a flotation device for the kid to grab.
Then another guard helped Tellez to spot and rescue yet more people stuck in the current by the rocks, a group of six or so.
And then came what he said was the “scariest.” As he sat in the lifeguard tower, he saw two jet skis exit the harbor, round the corner and get caught in a strong current. Waves pushed one of the jet skis toward the rocks, where Tellez noticed that one of the skiers, a woman, had fallen in the water.
“I jumped down and blew my whistle and headed out past the bend of the rocks,” he wrote. “The current was insanely strong out there. Luckily all of them were wearing lifejackets, not tight enough for them to work properly though.”
One of the skiers jumped in to save the woman, but, when Tellez got there, he ordered him back to his jet ski. The woman grabbed ahold of Tellez’s flotation device.
“The waves were crashing over our heads and were at least 3 feet tall,” he wrote. “It was quite scary because the structural current was trying to push us out and in at the same time, ultimately pulling us down, making walking out of the current extremely hard.”
How to stay safe
He offered some quick survival tips if you go in the water:
∎ ”Know your capabilities, and don’t push that boundary.”
∎ Wear a life jacket if you’re boating.
∎ Listen to lifeguards. “Consistently throughout the day I was moving people away from the rocks and explaining the dangers of them,” he wrote, adding, “we even have a swim zone flag to help people know where it’s safe to swim.”
Find outdoor columnist Joseph Dits on Facebook at SBTOutdoorAdventures or 574-235-6158 or jdits@gannett.com.
This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: Lake Michigan lifeguards save lives against ‘insanely strong’ currents in one weekend
Reporting by Joseph Dits, South Bend Tribune / South Bend Tribune
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
