Windsurfing champion rescued by fellow kitesurfers on Martha’s Vineyard

Pulled like a puppet six meters above the Sengekontacket pond Martha’s VineyardNevin Sayre almost lost his life when he hit the water in a kitesurfing accident earlier this month.

The sailing champion and hall of fame windsurfer from Vineyard Haven had just made a huge leap over the pond when his kite suddenly went backwards, pulling him straight to the surface with a force greater than gravity.

“He just hit the water so hard (and) nothing on his body moved,” said Scott DiBiaso, one of several sailors who came ashore and were shocked to see the powerful flier drag Sayre’s unconscious body away from the beach.

On the pond, kite boarder Robert (Bear) Harding was already sailing to the rescue when DiBiaso called 911.

‘Bear was immediately after him. It was probably less than 45 seconds (after the crash),” DiBiaso said.

Sayre was now well over Sengekontacket and still unconscious, his lungs and stomach filled with salty pond water that had been forced through his open mouth as the kite pulled his body downwind.

Harding freed both men from their kite harnesses and began giving Sayre chest compressions from behind, Heimlich style, as he entered the deep water to keep their heads above the surface.

Another sailor on the beach, Quinn Keefe, went swimming to help Harding, followed by DiBiaso with a surfboard borrowed from his son Ethan.

“I took off my harness and grabbed the floatiest surfboard he had in the car,” DiBiaso said.

Working together, the sailors managed to load Sayre onto the surfboard – no easy feat with an unresponsive 6-foot, 2-inch, 200-pound athlete, made even heavier by all the water he had swallowed.

“Nevin was still, for all intents and purposes, a corpse in the water,” DiBiaso said.

But as they swam him back to shore, about 100 yards away, near the bridge made famous by Jaws, Sayre began to fight for life, convulsing and spewing some of the water from his body.

“We’re yelling at him, ‘Come on, Nevin! Come on, Nevin! ” DiBiaso said.

“His eyes were rolled back in his head, so he didn’t react that way, but we were certainly encouraged that his body was struggling,” he said.

Sayre regained consciousness during the ambulance ride to Martha’s Vineyard Hospital, where he was loaded into a helicopter and flown to Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

“It was chilly because they took off my wetsuit,” Sayre said in an interview last week.

Sayre was also given a mask to help his waterlogged lungs breathe, but doctors found no broken bones or brain injuries from the crash.

“I’m just incredibly lucky,” he said.

After two days in the intensive care unit at Brigham and Women’s, Sayre’s lungs were drying out and hospital staff were ready to move him to a regular ward for another day or two of observation.

“They saw the last X-ray and said, ‘There’s still ocean in it, but you’re doing fine,’” he said.

The hospital had no regular beds available, Sayre said, so Brigham and Women’s did something unprecedented: They released him straight from the intensive care unit.

“The nurse had to go to another floor to get discharge papers. She had never filled them out,” he said, choking up briefly as he described what happened next.

“I get emotional when I say this: I walked out of the ICU,” Sayre said.

“You could tell among the nurses – some were crying, some were laughing, some were clapping – they had never seen anyone leave the ICU before,” he continued.

“They see people going to the wards or (the morgue),” Sayre said. “And here’s this super happy guy who walked out.”

He still doesn’t know exactly what happened over Sengekontacket Pond on Oct. 18, but it was likely a combination of wind gusts and human error, Sayre told the Gazette.

“I think I have a memory of being in the air and thinking, ‘Oh… this isn’t good,’ and then I have no memory until I was loaded onto a stretcher into the ambulance,” said he.

But Sayre believes he was conscious at least until the impact.

“(Harding) said I stuck my arm out right before I hit the water,” he said.

Sayre knows one thing for sure: he is only alive because his fellow sailors were there – especially Harding, the only one who was already on the water and could reach him quickly.

Harding’s quick response and life-saving training made the difference between an accident and a tragedy, Sayre said.

“He saved the day. Without him I wouldn’t be here,” he said.

Sayre’s accident was a wake-up call for sailors along the coast like himself, he said.

“It’s going to be my mission to make sure there’s a safety rescue sign on that beach,” he said.

“In this case, there would have been 10 people who would have taken the board and would have gotten to Bear much faster, even in regular clothes,” Sayre said, adding that kitesurfers are not the only ones at risk.

“Think of all the people jumping off the Jaws Bridge, or the fishermen on the rocks who could slip,” he said.

Sayre also plans to brush up on his own emergency skills.

“It’s been a long time since I’ve taken a CPR (or) first aid course, so I’m updating it and looking for other courses,” he said.

“We all need more training and to be like Bear,” Sayre said.

The Vineyard newspaper on Martha’s Vineyard is a news partner of MassLive.com. To subscribe to the Vineyard newspaper, click here.