Waves carry surfer 18 miles in overnight ordeal

ABERDEEN -- Talk about riding a wave.

Jens Eventyr went to Westhaven State Park near Westport last week to do a bit of surfing. He did much more, getting caught in 12-foot swells in the Pacific Ocean that pushed him away from shore and had him clinging to his board through a stormy night at sea.

He finally got back to land the next afternoon, 18 miles north of where his impromptu adventure had begun.

"I can't even explain how horrible it was," Eventyr, of Olympia, told The Daily World newspaper. "Think about the worst nightmare of your life, but it goes on all night long.

"And the whole time you know you're clinging onto the edge of death."

Eventyr, 32, has been surfing for about five years. On March 19, he went out alone to the Pacific coast and wasn't terribly worried even when he was first sucked out by the current at about 5 p.m.

He tried to paddle back to the beach, but the choppy water kept pushing him out farther. The jetty was still in sight and he was willing to sacrifice the surf board to the rocks if that's what it took to climb onto the jetty and walk back to the beach.

"But then I got plummeted by the first big wave," he said. "It pushed me and my board under. I was disoriented for a second. I didn't know if I was swimming up or down."

That was followed by two more waves crashing over him.

"By this time, I knew there was no more getting to the jetty," he said. So he grabbed onto his surf board and tried to figure out what to do next.

As the sun was setting, he spotted a Coast Guard ship about 50 yards away and yelled as loudly as he could.

"No one could hear me," he said. "It was so frustrating."

After sundown, he spotted a second ship about 30 yards away on the other side of the jetty. But no one saw him bobbing in the water.

"It got dark and I knew the only one who could save me was me," Eventyr said. "I just had so many things going through my mind."

As the light drifted to the south, Eventyr knew the ocean was taking him farther north.

"I started thinking that maybe I should just conserve my energy so I can ride this out as long as possible and eventually get found alive," he said.

Through the night, he hung onto his board in the 50-degree water, pelted by sporadic rain, seasick and vomiting.

"It sounds weird, but there were times I wanted to fall asleep, but it was like this voice telling me I had to stay awake," he said. His wet suit helped keep him warm, covering everything but his face.

Just when he thought he couldn't take any more, "the sun came up," he said. "It was amazing. It was like I closed my eyes and it was dark, and I opened them and it was light."

His wife, Kirstin, contacted the Coast Guard at 7:45 a.m. Thursday, saying her husband had left the previous day to go surfing off the coast near Grays Harbor. Authorities found his van, minus the surf board and wet suit.

Two Coast Guard helicopters and some boats scoured the area as search crews on foot - including his wife, friends and family - looked for him along the beaches.

To the north, the same current that had sent Eventyr away from the beach began changing direction. He tried to catch a wave to ride in to the beach. After a few attempts, he caught one.

"All I could see is a cliff in front of me and I thought that I was going to get slammed up against it," he said. Instead the ocean dropped him on a strip of soft, sandy beach.

"When I stood up, I could barely hold my weight up," he said.

He climbed to an old, unmanned Coast Guard station atop a cliff and encountered a young couple who gave him a ride into Taholah, a town on the Quinalt Indian Reservation.

"When he came in, his face was blue and he was shriveled up, with red blood vessels on his face," said Lois Hetland, a clerk at Taholah Mercantile. Hetland said she asked Eventyr if he was the surfer she'd heard was missing off the coast of Westport. When he said he was, she called paramedics and covered him with a thick wool blanket.

Coast Guard officials were amazed he survived.

"That man really had a will to live," Petty Officer Clint Strayhorn said. "It's amazing. That will be a story for the grandkids."