One man, a full crew and a night on the water. The cost of repeat risk-taking on the coast

Late on the evening of 30 July, in Ustka on the Polish Baltic coast, a man refused to come out of the water after dark. He climbed onto the groynes and moved away from the shore. The alert came from a woman on the beach who spotted him and called it in. He was brought out by rescuers from the Ustka shore rescue station and by police officers, after an exchange of words on the waterline. Local residents say incidents involving the same person recur every season.

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31 july 2026   |   00:58   |   Source: Gazeta Morska   |   Prepared by: Kamil Kusier   |   Print

fot. Mariusz Jasłowski

Water after dark is a different environment

The same beach stops being the same place once the light goes. Visibility disappears, so does any reliable fix on where a person in the water actually is, and every minute of searching costs more than it would in daylight. The groynes he was walking on are uneven, weed-covered and slippery, with scoured seabed and current on either side. They are not a walkway. A fall from a groyne at dusk is the scenario in which a casualty does not resurface where he went under.

This is why an intervention involving one person who will not leave the water is not an intervention involving one person. It commits a crew, equipment and time, during which the same people are unavailable to anyone else along that stretch of coast. If a genuine drowning develops in the same window, the bill for one man's routine is settled by a complete stranger.

Arguing with a rescuer is not a private matter

What happens once responders arrive deserves separate attention. A dispute on the beach is not an exchange between two parties with equally weighted positions. Rescuers work in conditions where pace and clarity decide the outcome, and every minute spent negotiating is a minute in which nothing else can be done. The practical effect is a longer intervention and a higher risk profile for everyone involved, the person arguing included.

Repetition is the part that matters

A one-off act of bravado is an incident. Behaviour that residents say repeats every season is a systemic problem and should be treated as one. Each repetition carries the same costs: committed assets, consumed time, and the fatigue of people handling dozens of calls a week at the height of summer.

Ustka needs no hypotheticals here. The same day, at an unguarded bathing area in the same town, a 78-year-old man collapsed. Resuscitation ran for over an hour and ended with a medical helicopter transfer to Koszalin. That is the real weight of the season, and the real stake when someone draws rescuers into the water after dark for his own satisfaction.

Two things are worth separating at this point. The assessment of the behaviour itself is unambiguous and there is no case for indulgence. But the question of why the same person returns to the water year after year, and after dark, is an open one that no press commentary will answer. If the reason is a disregard for the hazard, this is bravado. If it is something else, criticism alone resolves nothing, and the answer lies with the municipality and the services, which hold instruments reaching further than persuasion on a beach.

Whichever version is true, one thing does not change. Nights like this end well only because somebody on the other side turned out, went into the water and did the job.

One element of this incident worked exactly as it should. The alert came from an ordinary person on the shore, a woman who saw a man in the water after dark and decided that it was only superficially none of her business. She did not need to be certain that something was wrong, and that is precisely why she made the call. That reflex is what coastal safety depends on for the rest of the season.

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