OCEAN CITY — The seventh and last Rehoboth Beach Patrol lifeguard stand, one of many that went missing from the neighboring Delaware resort in early July, was recovered in the Outer Banks last weekend, completing a two-month, 250-mile journey.
In early July, seven lifeguard stands were reported missing from the beach in Rehoboth, which had been the victim of an apparent prank. The seven missing stands represented one third of the Delaware beach resort’s entire fleet of lifeguard chairs. The stands were discovered missing by the town’s beach sweeping crews when they did their morning clean-up operation on July 8.
The Rehoboth Police responded, but no suspects in the caper were ever identified. Rehoboth Police and the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control searched in vain for the missing lifeguard stands and a Delaware State Police helicopter cruised the coastline but did not find any evidence of the missing stands in the water or hidden somewhere on the beach.
The lifeguard stands were then believed to be floating somewhere in the open ocean, creating a potential navigation hazard off the mid-Atlantic coast. Each of the sturdy wooden lifeguard stands weighs around 500 pounds and could inflict serious damage on a vessel of nearly any size if encountered in the ocean. However, the missing stands began to turn up one by one over the next week or so.
Three days after the lifeguard chairs were reported missing, Captain Mark Sampson on the “Fish Finder” out of Ocean City was fishing about two miles off the coast when he came upon one of the missing stands floating in the water. Sampson reported the coordinates for the potential navigational hazard to the Coast Guard and continued fishing, but when he came across the lifeguard stand a second time, he and his crew fashioned a makeshift tackle set-up and brought the chair in themselves.
Throughout the next week or so, more of the missing Rehoboth lifeguard stands were recovered from the ocean. By mid-week, six of the seven lifeguard stands had been recovered. Three washed up on neighboring Delaware beaches, Sampson and the “Fish Finder” crew recovered another, Coast Guard Station Ocean City hauled in a fifth and Coast Guard Station Indian River hauled in a sixth.
After two months, the last one had become an afterthought. Last weekend, however, it was found washed up on the beach in Salvo, N.C. in the Outer Banks, some 250 miles away from where it had disappeared two months earlier.