Ohope boarder drowns

Ohope beach. Photo / Supplied

A 22-year-old man drowned while boogie-boarding with friends at a popular Bay of Plenty beach yesterday morning.

The man was one of six who had recently moved into a rental property in Ohope, a resort community about 7km south of Whakatane.

The alarm was raised when he became separated from his boogie board and disappeared out to sea just after 11am.

His friends ran to a nearby house for help and found Coastguard volunteers David Marshall and his wife Kim, who scanned the ocean with a telescope from their second-storey window, looking for the man.

The group were 4km from the surf club on a section not patrolled by lifesavers when they got into trouble.

Marshall and his 18-year-old daughter Chloe, also a Coastguard member, ran to the beach and swam to where the boarder had last been seen but could not find him. Then Marshall contacted Stephen Clews and his wife Linda, both Coastguard senior masters, who lived nearby. Linda Clews saw the victim in the water.

"At that stage he was floating face down," said Stephen Clews. "I grabbed a set of fins and shot down there. David and Chloe had not managed to find anything at that stage and had come back to the beach."

Clews had a "fair idea" of where to search so took Chloe back out to continue the search.

As they swam they could see the white of the man's singlet as each swell rolled past.

They found him floating face down just below the surface, having drifted just beyond the breakers.

The victim was unresponsive and Clews supported him and kept his head out of the water until Marshall came out with a jetski.

Surf lifesavers, who had joined the rescue with an inflatable rescue boat and two surf quad bikes, started CPR immediately the man was returned to the beach, but to no avail.

Clews, a Whakatane Coastguard volunteer for 12 years, said he suspected the drowned man may have been caught in a small rip.

Police said another of the men was pulled from the water and survived.

Yesterday grieving friends gathered in disbelief outside the Mason Place home that they shared with the dead man.

His flatmate, Mandeep Singh, said his friend did not have the boogie board's arm rope attached to him.

"It seems like a big set of waves just came and sucked the sand out from under their feet."

He said his friend had been living in Hamilton before moving to Ohope where the men were to start work for a cut-price electricity company.

He would not give the name of the dead man, saying family in India had to be notified first.

An elderly neighbour of the men described how the survivors sat sobbing outside their home on Mason Place yesterday afternoon.

"It's very, very sad," she said. If anybody wants to do anything it is to feel sorry for those boys who lost their friend."

The drowning is at least the 28th this year, well up on the same point in 2010.

- Additional reporting: Andre Hueber, Leigh van der Stoep and Carolyne Meng-Yee