The fact that Ocean Shores had “decommissioned” its surf rescue team as a cost-saving item in the 2013 city budget never occurred to Jim Brannan as he clung to his overturned boat north of Damon Point for nearly an hour, watching responding Police and Fire arrive on the shore.

“The public doesn’t know,” Brannan said Monday night after he went to the City Council to tell of his June 6 ordeal and question why no one would — or could — do more than shoot a lifeline toward him to help pull him ashore. “When I was in that water, I thought I was not going to make it.”

“You cannot have a beach community and not have a surf rescue. The public needs to know that if you’re out there, you are pretty much on your own,” he said.

Prior to 2013, Ocean Shores did have a fully manned and trained surf rescue team comprised of Police and Fire Department personnel, but the $52,000 needed to fund the effort was cut from the 2013 budget by the 2012 City Council, and it was never restored in subsequent years.

Brannan was incredulous. “I have never been in a situation where I stood on the beach and watched someone drown. I cannot imagine that. But I do know what it’s like to be out in that water looking back at the beach, thinking there’s the Fire Department and they are going to watch me drown.”

Brannan had been fishing in his small boat when he fell overboard, tipping over the boat trying to get back aboard. He was wearing a lifejacket equipped with a whistle, and he began blowing the whistle and began yelling for help until he could see people arriving on shore.

“Tuesday afternoon OSFD received tones for a surf rescue south of the marina off of Snuggler’s Cove. There was a second-hand report of a fisherman in a small boat that had capsized and he was blowing a whistle and yelling for help,” said a Fire Department news release on the incident.

When Police and Fire arrived on scene, they found Brannan still in the water approximately 300-350 feet offshore clutching his boat to stay afloat, according to the Fired Department account.

Brannan recalls: “I was swimming so hard and pulling my boat, because it was swamped but still it was floating, so I could hold on to the bow. But then I thought, okay, I can hear the sirens, and then people walked out, but I could see no one was in a wetsuit, and no one had a surf board. I was getting really cold, and I yelled, ‘Hey, I’m in trouble! I need help.”

He estimates he had been in the water for about an hour, trying to keep his boat afloat.

“The man was too cold to make it in to shore on his own. Fire department personnel used the ResQmax air propelled line gun to shoot a flotation device attached to a tag line near the victim. He was able to grab it and put on the flotation sling while the rescue crew pulled the man into shore. The victim and his boat were successfully rescued,” the news release said.

“The victim was a local Ocean Shores resident and was not injured during the event, although he was very close to having hypothermia and spent over 30 minutes in the back of the ambulance with blankets and heat packs while the EMS crew performed their evaluation. Ultimately the victim was not transported to the hospital and the OSFD assisted the man in retrieving his boat and belongings.”

To Brannan, there is far more to the story, and he made a passionate appeal to the City Council on Monday to reconsider funding for a surf rescue team.

“I talked to those guys afterward, and they told me their hands were tied,” he said of the inability to actually perform a full water rescue. “They have been told, ‘don’t go into the water.’”

Of all the priorities the city faces, he said, surf rescue would seem to be among the most important. When told he was about to exceed his allotted three minutes, Brannan said: “Something needs to be done about this and it’s not going to go away.”