'I was holding on for dear life': Cork father who clung to son was seconds from losing grip on buoy
A father who clung to a fishing buoy with his son for 40 minutes after they were swept out to sea by strong currents said he was seconds away from losing his grip when help arrived.
Damien O’Donovan spoke of the relief he felt when a local man and five teenagers plucked him and his son, Muruthi, nine, from the water off Fountainstown in Co Cork on Sunday evening, averting an almost certain double-tragedy.
“I was holding on for dear life,” said Damien, from Dunkettle. “I had made a promise to my son that we’d be safe and that we would get to see the Champions League final that night. But I could feel the numbness setting in, and my grip was getting weaker. I felt I could only hang on for just a few more seconds — and then help came.”
He said the inflatable lilo that they had been playing with in shallow water just moments earlier helped to save their lives.
“If we didn’t have that lilo, two funerals would have been planned today,” he said.
He returned to the beach yesterday to thank Paddy Quinlan, an RNLI volunteer who runs Funkytown water sports centre on the local beach, for saving Muruthi.
He sent messages of thanks to family members of the five teenagers who were fishing off a rib nearby and who responded to the Pan-Pan alert to save him.
Damien and his son were paddling in a few feet of water in the back beach area of Fountainstown when they got into difficulty at around 7.30pm on Sunday.
“One minute, I could put my feet on the bottom, and the next, I couldn’t,” he said.
The pair held onto the lilo and tried to swim towards the shore, but got caught in a strong current, which flows from a nearby channel towards the sea.
“An Olympic swimmer would not have been able to cope with that current,” said Damien.
They held onto the lilo as they were swept seawards before Damien spotted a marker buoy in the channel and grabbed it, holding on to a metal ring with just two fingers. He then grabbed Muruthi between his legs and clung on for dear life.
By now, onlookers had raised the alarm.
Valentia Coast Guard’s Marine Rescue Coordination Centre issued a Pan-Pan alert for any vessel in the locality to respond, and tasked the Waterford-based Coast Guard helicopter Rescue 117, Crosshaven RNLI, and Crosshaven Coast Guard ground units, as gardaí and National Ambulance Service paramedics responded.
A local woman phoned Mr Quinlan, who lives nearby. He grabbed a paddle from home, jumped on his bicycle and rode to the beach within minutes, where a local garda had a canoe in the water for him.
Damien said he had to swap hands on the buoy a few times and rubbed his son’s chest to keep his circulation flowing and his body heat up, and that a point came where he shut out all emotion as they tried to stay calm.
“As the time went on, I could see my son was getting nervous, so I said to myself I need to keep him concentrated and calm,” he said.
“I said: ‘Keep your eyes on me, trust me, we’re going to get home and see the Champions League’. Then we started playing a word game to distract him.”
Seconds later, Mr Quinlan arrived at the buoy in his canoe and Damien told him to save Muruthi first.
Mr Quinlan said: “They had been in the water a long time, and they were running out of energy.”
He brought Muruthi ashore and paddled back out to save Damien just as the five teenagers — Harry Pritchard, Jamie Venner, Richard McSweeney, Cillian Foster, and Kate Horgan — who had been fishing nearby, arrived in their boat.
They hauled Damien onto their rib and brought him to safety, where he was reunited with Muruthi.
Three of the five have direct family connections to the RNLI. Jamie’s dad, Ian, was the helm of the Crosshaven RNLI boat which responded to the incident, Cillian is a brother of another Crosshaven RNLI crew member, Caoimhe Foster, and Richard’s father, Kieran, is a former crew member of Baltimore RNLI.
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