Teenagers rescue seven people from surf on the NSW Sout Coast

Several teenagers out body boarding have rescued seven people from drowning in two separate incidents in Kiama on the New South Wales South Coast.

Transcript

00:00 Yesterday, just around 20 minutes after we closed the beach, I was out bodyboarding with

00:07 a few of my mates and just heard a couple of people screaming and we thought they were

00:12 just having fun with their friends. But then we realised that they were screaming again,

00:17 looked over and realised that they were in trouble. So we all came over with our boards

00:21 and gave the boards to them and helped them in back to the shore.

00:25 How many people were out there?

00:26 There was six, so there was a mum and three children and two teenagers that were just

00:33 there by themselves. Pretty surreal because just as we closed the beach, a rip just popped

00:40 up right in the middle. It was quite a big rip too, pulling out fast and people were

00:44 getting sucked out really quickly and just in distress. We got over there as quickly

00:49 as we could to help them out.

00:50 My first thought was, "This can't be happening." Because it was 20 minutes after the lifeguards

00:56 had packed up and left. So there was all six of us. I got to an eight, nine year old kid

01:03 called Matt and by the time I got to him, he was completely underwater. Just his hand

01:08 just above the surface of the water. So I was pretty worried. I got him up, he coughed

01:14 up some water, just checked he was okay and we all tried to make our way in against the

01:19 rip. It was shocking but we just had to do what we could.

01:24 [silence]