A lifeguard’s most crucial piece of equipment is, undoubtedly, a buoy. Buoys are our lifelines, they help us make rescues faster, safer, easier. The oxygen tank, backboard, and reel are also extremely important pieces of equipment, especially in life-threatening cases.
But I think our most versatile piece of equipment is the smallest one: the orange Fox-40 whistles that we swing around our fingertips while walking, tie around our bathing suit straps or wrists just before we dive into the water, and that we spend all day using to make a beep-beep-beep sound to try and get beachgoers to listen to us. These whistles are our main method of communication across our swimming area.
Like a species of orange shorebirds, lifeguards have created their own language of different pitches and lengths of whistle blasts, complimented with hand motions.
Sometimes birds miss a note of their song, some sing better than others, and chicks learn to sing with practice. Lifeguards are no different. New lifeguards, horns, often struggle to get a loud, crisp sounding whistle, and end up with a screeching, sort of straggling sound.
Occasionally, lifeguards blow a long case whistle by accident and send half of the beach into a brief panic. And for some reason, I myself have never been able to master the art of the chirp, a soft, tweet-like whistle.
When we hear one long blast, BEEEEEEP, we know it is a case whistle — someone is going in for a rescue — and even if I hear that sound in the middle of October during a CYO soccer game, my stomach drops for just a second.
Multiple short whistles, beep-beep-beep, are typically for catching swimmers’ and beachgoers’ attention. These whistles are usually accompanied by sweeping arm movements, like waving swimmers closer to shore or moving them out of rip currents and away from rock jetties. For beachgoers on land, short whistles can be used to stop them from setting up their chairs directly in front of our buoys.
A slightly lesser-known whistle we use is the “chirp,” the short, tweety whistle used to get the attention of guards on nearby chairs or walking posts. Chirps can be used to communicate anything from a footman to a missing child.
We have hand signals for many common situations like missing children, sharks, giving the “OK,” slow/fast lieutenant, manpower, and so on. But things get a little dicey when I’m trying to explain to someone with hand motions and whistles that l have a lost grown woman who’s going to climb into the chair with me because she can’t find her friend or any of her belongings, so please look out for a purple towel.
It’s especially difficult to try and communicate that you need a footman to pick up your whistle that you dropped, because, you know…
But we’ve found ways to communicate many complex ideas with whistles. I can tell the chair next to me that I see dolphins, that the bridge to Atlantic Beach is going up, that I want them to look at the closed beach because I can’t tell if someone’s swimming over there, or even that there are so many people in the water I’m losing my mind (that one just looks like me putting my head in my hands and shaking my head).
There are some instances where a whistle or hand motion is not even needed to communicate with your chair neighbor, especially one that you’ve been working alongside for a long time. Sometimes a quick nod will do the trick, and you both know it’s time to run full speed into the water with your buoys.
