He took a picture of himself after surgery but didn’t want to show it to us. “I had slime everywhere! On Monday, the head of the nautical brigade Mathieu Quiniou had to intervene in the middle of the port of La Forêt-Fouesnant (Finistère) to rescue a teenager who had silted up. The 17-year-old tourist had ventured into the middle of the harbor at low tide to go fishing and found himself trapped in the mud. “His boots were stuck. He had mud up to his waist and he couldn’t get out of it, ”says the gendarme.
It was a little after 3 p.m. when the gendarmes Quiniou and Fraissinet grabbed their hard plan to venture into the port. Hung by a piece of rope, the two soldiers used their rescue board to move forward in the mud and rescue the teenager, stuck about fifty meters from the shore. “We sank up to our knees, even with the board”, says the brigade leader. On the coast, the teenager’s mother watched the scene without being able to intervene. “He wasn’t panicked but he couldn’t move. With his boots, the slime had had a sucker effect. It was like quicksand. The mud is treacherous, ”says the gendarme. Without the intervention of the rescuers, the sea, which was rising, could have engulfed the boy.
To get the teenager out of the trap, the nautical brigade asked him to lie down as much as possible in order to “increase his surface on the ground”. Leaning on their board, the gendarmes managed to get the young man out of the mud to bring him back to dry land, where the firefighters were waiting for him.
While accidents are on the increase on the Brittany coast, the nautical brigade reminds us that it is essential to find out about the tides and not to venture just anywhere. “People don’t see the danger, but everything can go very quickly,” warns Chief Quiniou.