“Pick your days,” says surfer Natalie Baggesen, 19, a URI sophomore who has surfed for about three years.

>

The Providence Journal Kris Craig

Riding her surfboard like a horse, her lower legs going like egg beaters in the water, Natalie Baggesen did her best to stay calm and keep the South Kingstown shore in view.

Tuesday’s high wind was blowing her toward Block Island. She had done everything she knew to get back to Matunuck Point.

It was about noon. She had already fought the wind and current for an hour or longer, lying on the board and doing the crawl stroke with her arms, first trying to reach a group of surfers on her right, then trying to get to shore almost directly into the wind, then heading perpendicular to the wind, figuring she could walk back from Charlestown or wherever she landed.

The only thing she got any closer to was Block Island.

“Right after I tried all three options,” Baggesen, 19, said yesterday on the back deck of her family’s home in the Ashaway section of Hopkinton, “I thought: I am really stuck out here.

“I had a little talk with God.”

“I could use a change in the winds, God,” she prayed. “I know you can do it, so if you just want to shift them, I’m just going to sit until you do something.”

All by herself in the water, she said, she felt like Tom Hanks in Castaway. “I’m going to have a friend Wilson out here,” she said, referring to the ball the stranded Hanks character turned into a friend.

She reasoned that her fellow surfer, Leah Del Giudice, her friend since they were on the track team together at Chariho Regional High School, “knew I was out in the water and she would come to shore at some point during the day, and she would realize I wasn’t with her, and she would call the Coast Guard. At that point, I decided to sit and wait.”

“I was sitting on the board. After I stopped trying to fight it, I got the most distance in the shortest amount of time.

“I was moving but not in the direction I wanted to go.”

Her body was serving as a sail, and the wind was pushing her farther from shore.

She saw Leah on shore running up to one door of the Ocean Mist bar and restaurant and not being able to get in, then running around to another door.

“I saw people running around at that point, so I knew that somebody had seen me.”

Once inside the Ocean Mist, Del Giudice asked the first person she saw, assistant manager Trish Mancini, 35, to call for help. Mancini called the Coast Guard from her cell phone.

From out in the water, Baggesen “could hear the police sirens go off on shore, and [the Department of Environmental Management] was there.”

“I heard the Coast Guard boat come. They were closer to the shore than I was.”

Coast Guard officials later said she was between 2 and 3 miles offshore at this point.

From their vantage point at the restaurant, DEM personnel helped direct the Coast Guard to Baggesen.

“I turned around, paddled over to the boat, and they pulled me in.

“They asked if I was OK, if I needed anything, whether I was cold, if I needed a blanket, told me to sit down and asked me what happened,” she said. “I told them the winds pushed me out; I couldn’t paddle against the winds.”

Someone on the boat gave her a phone so she could ask Del Giudice, 19, to pick her up at Coast Guard Station Point Judith.

Narragansett EMTs “were right there; they checked me for hypothermia. My temperature was 96, so they said I was OK, asked me if I wanted to go to the hospital.”

She declined, signed the forms saying she had declined, then sat and waited for Del Giudice.

“I met a couple of cute Coast Guard boys,” said Baggesen, who just finished her sophomore year at the University of Rhode Island.

Yesterday, when she went back to the Deep Hole fishing area where she and Del Giudice had parked Tuesday morning, she was introduced to Pat McNulty, a man who said he has been surfing since 1965 and caught some of Tuesday’s waves.

McNulty, a grandfather, asked the 19-year-old:

“Did you learn a lesson?”

“That it was too windy,” said Baggesen, who has surfed for three years. “Pick your days.”

dnaylor@projo.com