Drone captures teen’s rescue of mom, son caught in powerful rip current at NC beach
A mother and her son were struggling in the water off the coast of North Carolina when an 18-year-old on a lime green body board spotted them.
Over the next 4 1/2 minutes, a drone hovering overhead recorded their rescue.
Travis Shrout, a college sophomore from Ohio, is credited with saving the lives of Ashley Batchelor and her 10-year-old son Conner at Topsail Beach over the July Fourth holiday weekend, according to reports from the media and family members. Batchelor is from Raleigh, WOIO reported.
“I kept seeing the drone over me and I’m like, ‘this drone is going to watch us die today,’” she told the TV station.
Batchelor said they were in the ocean for just a few minutes on July 3 before a current suddenly pulled them out, according to WOIO. The riptide proved too challenging to fight.
“(Conner) looked at me and said, ‘I can’t do this anymore, mommy.’ That’s when my heart sank. Everything changed for me,” Batchelor said.
Shrout, meanwhile, was in the water to help a family friend, Thad Unkefer, try out some features on his drone, WJW reported. He said it was the family’s last day at the beach and everyone else had gone back shore.
He noticed the “waves were a little rougher than usual,” the Akron Beacon Journal reported.
“I thought I heard ‘help’ but it was such a weird situation,” Shrout told the newspaper. “I said, ‘Are you all right?’ and she said, ‘No.’ I immediately started swimming out to her.”
The drone video shows Shrout with his arm draped across the body board near where Batchelor and her son were struggling. There’s no audio, but Shrout is suddenly seen paddling toward them. He pushed the board toward Batchelor before taking off after her son.
Shrout said he’d been “sucked out probably 15 feet,” WJW reported.
“I knew I couldn’t swim fast enough with the board,” Shrout told the Beacon Journal. “I was already not going as fast as I wanted, and he had already gone under four or five times. He was bobbing up and down, so I got underneath him and had him float.”
Batchelor caught up to them with the body board, pushing it out so all three could hold on, the video shows. The trio stayed afloat like that for several minutes, with Connor still clinging to Shrout’s shoulder. Eventually, they laid him across the board while Shrout and Batchelor hung on to both sides.
“There was a couple of waves that came over our heads and I didn’t know how many more of those waves were gonna come,” Shrout said, according to WJW. “They completely submerged all of us. So, that was kind of scary.”
The teenager’s family, meanwhile, was watching from shore.
“I was watching him, and I stood up to tell him to come in because he was getting too far out and I couldn’t figure out why he was swimming out so far,” his mother, Gretia Grayson Shrout, told the Beacon Journal. “Then I saw the splashing and we realized what was going on. Your instinct as a mom is to jump in and help your kid, but I know I’m not a strong enough swimmer to do that. I just had to watch. It was a completely helpless feeling.”
Another person eventually passed them a second body board, WOIO reported.
When the trio got close enough to shore, the video shows someone helping to yank them out of the current, which is tugging Batchelor and her son back even as Shrout and the second person formed a human chain to pull them in. A wave eventually carried them close enough that they could stand.
The video shows several people helping the group the rest of the way in — including Shrout’s mom, who gave Batchelor a long hug.
“I’m just telling her, ‘He’s my angel. If he has no other purpose, he’s fulfilled his life. He saved us,’” Batchelor said she told Grayson Shrout, according to WIOO.
Grayson Shrout also posted about the ordeal on Facebook with a link to the drone footage. She said it was “like something out of a movie.”
“The mom grabbed me and just started crying and shaking telling me how God sent Travis to save them and she literally thought they were going to both die,” she said in the post. “Crazy emotional day here.”
This story was originally published July 16, 2021 at 1:56 PM with the headline "Drone captures teen’s rescue of mom, son caught in powerful rip current at NC beach."
