Missing Long Beach swimmer feared swept away by riptide - Long Beach Press-Telegram

SEAL BEACH - An air and surface search was under way today for a 26-year-old man who vanished off the Orange County coastline, apparently swept away by a powerful rip current.

The missing man -- identified by the U.S. Coast Guard this morning as 26- year-old Jowayne Binford of Long Beach -- was one of four young men who entered the water at Surfside Beach Wednesday evening in spite of a high surf advisory scheduled to remain in force until Friday night, according to Seal Beach police.

"After experiencing a strong rip current, the young men attempted to exit the water," said a Seal Beach Police Department statement, adding that only three of them made it.

The man who failed to return was last seen by lifeguards around 6 p.m., the Seal Beach statement said. He was about 200 yards offshore, between Sunset Beach and the northern entrance of Anaheim Bay, added a Coast Guard statement.

"The lifeguards reported seeing him in the water, and then not anymore," Coast Guard spokesman Trent Kelly said in a telephone interview.

He said the Seal Beach Police Department has made contact with the missing man's family.

Seal Beach Lifeguard Chief Joe Bailey told KCAL that the man "was on a body board. The body board washed ashore, so its a bad sign."

Binford's disappearance triggered a response involving the Coast Guard, the Orange County Sheriff's Department's Newport Harbor Patrol, Long Beach lifeguards and the Huntington Beach

Police Department, which supplied a helicopter, the Coast Guard reported.

The search was scaled back due to darkness but was expected to resume in full after sunrise today. In the meantime, as a Coast Guard helicopter searched from above, the agency's 87-foot cutter Narwhal plied the waters off Huntington Beach overnight amid swells of up to 10 feet, Kelly said.

A witness told KCAL that the man who disappeared and his friends entered the water even after they were warned by a lifeguard to stay close to the shore because the nearby lifeguard station was closing for the night.

The lifeguard "didn't order them out of the water. He said you need to stay close to the shore for your own safety," witness Mike Spainhower reported.

01 Sep, 2011

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