Lieutenant Koa Lyu stands with his fire truck in front of Haystack Rock in Cannon Beach, Ore., July 18, 2025. Lyu is Cannon Beach's head lifeguard and leads the fire department's Ocean Safety Division. He says being an "ocean rescue man" is his calling.
Malya Fass / OPB
In the garage of the Cannon Beach Fire Department, between the shiny red fire trucks, is a sight you might not expect at a fire station: two huge, neon jetskis, mounted on a trailer. And on the back wall of the garage are wet suits and flippers hanging up to dry.
At this station, the crew doesn’t just fight fires. They also handle ocean rescues and lifeguard the beaches.
Cannon Beach is among the most popular destinations for beachgoers on Oregon’s North Coast, and keeping visitors safe is no small task. The station’s crew regularly trains to stay prepared. On a Friday in July, they’ve already run a timed drill of putting on their fire packs, and then a mock jetski rescue.
After a staged dispatch call for a swimmer in distress over the garage’s loudspeaker, the team springs into action. Brody Shill — the newest member of the Cannon Beach Fire crew — is in charge of the checklist. He’s fresh out of high school, and in training to be a rescue swimmer and a firefighter.
“Unplug skis from shore power! … Close and buckle, bow, hatch! … Check and secure seats and seat straps!” Shill rattles off in a fast-paced call and response, as the rest of the team runs around checking that the gear’s good to go. They rev up the jetskis on the trailer, before hooking them up to a truck & driving them towards the beach.
Supervising it all is Koa Lyu, a fire lieutenant and the head of Cannon Beach Fire’s Ocean Safety Division. He’s been in the lifeguarding business since he was 17, and says they deal with all kinds of disasters in their coastal city.
“Our department is predominantly a rescue department, which is pretty much based on our area and topography. Having the ocean here, the mountains and cliffs,” Lyu said.
“We’ve rescued people, kids, adults, dogs, you name it.”
OPB wanted to know what it’s like to be responsible for so many people’s safety — and whether lifeguarding is anything like how it’s portrayed on Baywatch — so for our “At Work With” series, we spent a day with Lyu to learn about patrolling one of Oregon’s most well-loved beaches.
Wait… there are lifeguards on Oregon beaches?
Several OPB audience members had this question! One of them asked, “what Oregon beaches have lifeguards? I’ll go to them, tell me where they are!”
Lyu is happy to report that there are two Oregon beaches with lifeguard programs: Cannon Beach, of course, and neighboring Seaside. He said interest in creating ocean rescue programs is growing in the Northwest.
“A lot of the fire departments up and down the coast are starting to build water rescue teams, as more people and tourists are venturing to the coastline,” he said. “We’re finding the need for more ocean safety, emergency services teams.”
How did you get into lifeguarding?
Lyu grew up in Hawaii, where the ocean was part of his life from a very young age.
“Ocean is part of the culture … we know to respect it,” he said. “It’s Mother Nature, right? She controls the ocean.”
He learned that lesson — and realized he had what it takes to be a lifeguard — on the day of his first rescue. His family was swimming in Honolulu when his mom and aunt got caught in some big waves. Lyu, who was 16 at the time, acted fast, almost without thinking. He ran into the water and pulled them out of the surf. We asked him if he remembered what was going through his mind.
“More than anything it was just like, ‘oh no, I’m not losing my mom,’” he said. “Later on in life, I really realized that the people, the first responders that do our jobs, you’re built a certain way, right? You don’t think of anything else. You just go and do.”
Lyu came to Cannon Beach as its new head lifeguard about a year ago, not long after the local fire department took over the lifeguard program from the city. In that year, he’s done a lot to reshape the program. For example, he implemented a patrol model: lifeguards spread out and patrol different zones of the beach, instead of having everyone stationed at the beach’s one lifeguard tower. This means lifeguards can respond to things more quickly, and it’s allowed them to do more education and prevention work across the beach. Meanwhile, between 2023 and 2024, the number of rescues the team performed dropped from 11 to one.
“I truly feel that the increase in prevention is what brought the rescue numbers down.”
Their efforts have paid off in other ways too: this year, Lyu’s team became the first lifeguard agency in Oregon to be certified by the United States Lifesaving Association.
How much do ocean lifeguards get paid?
A listener was curious about what the pay’s like for being a coastal lifeguard.
Lyu said he doesn’t do it for the money, he and other lifeguards do it because they love helping people. But he said, fire departments like his are struggling across the country.
“Fire departments statewide, and I think nationwide, are severely underfunded,” Lyu said. “The argument has been, there’s no volunteer police departments, there’s no volunteer police officers, so why are we having volunteer firefighters?”
What should beachgoers be most aware of when visiting the beach?
Lyu said whatever beach you go to, it’s a good idea to research the beach and surrounding area in advance.
In Cannon Beach, on-land hazards can include hot sand or hot rocks hidden under the surface from leftover, improperly extinguished bonfires. (Don’t just cover them with sand, use water!) And in the ocean, dangers can include large surf and rip currents.
An audience member asked, “is it true you can spot a riptide, and how?”
Lyu said, sometimes — it depends on how windy or foggy it is. But if there’s a clear view, you can often look at how the waves are forming and moving for clues.
“Ninety percent of the time, if there’s a rip current, that current is going to disturb the waves. So, if there’s a spot where there’s waves here and waves here,” pointing his hands out to either side, “and the middle, where there’s no waves, that’s where the rip current is going to be running through.”
He said if you ever get caught in a rip current, try your best to stay calm, and don’t waste precious energy trying to swim against the current.
“Try to figure out which way the water’s moving, which way you’re going. Swim across it to get out of the rip current, or just ride it out. Save your energy, ride it out, it’ll kick you out back, and then you can swim back in from that point,” he said.
More safety advice? Never turn your back on the ocean.
“One of the things that we were told all the time growing up, and we try to tell people all the time here, is you don’t turn your back to the ocean,” he said. “One, you don’t turn your back on anybody out of respect, but two, the ocean is unpredictable. So you always, always face the ocean. Never turn your back to the ocean.”
What do you make of how lifeguards are portrayed in popular culture? Is it really as glamorous as Baywatch?
“I mean, it’s Hollywood, right? At the same time, there are some really good-looking lifeguards out there,” Lyu said with a laugh.
As for the slow-motion running down the beach in swimsuits?
“It’s hard to do when it’s 60 degrees out here!”
What’s it like being on high alert so often?
Lyu is in ready-for-rescue mode pretty much all the time. Outside of work hours, on vacation, when he’s driving home… he doesn’t ever turn it off.
“A lot of times driving home, I’ll drive down the coast and I’m like, ‘OK, if this car crashes into that car, what am I going to do?’ I carry my radio with me. I have a little med kit in the back. I’ll slam on my brake,” he said. “Once you get into it, you start understanding that you really always have to be on high alert and something can happen at any time, right?”
He recognizes, though, that this mindset can take a toll over time. So can the secondhand trauma first responders are exposed to on tough rescue calls.
“Back in the day, the kind of old school fire department and emergency services [mentality] was always kind of to suck it up,” he said. “We really try to push here, especially with a lot of the younger guys: talk to somebody, right? It does help. Something that I’m still kind of learning too,” he said.
What was one of your most memorable rescues?
Lyu has been in some pretty scary situations himself. In January 2025, he had a rescue that made headlines. It was on a day he wasn’t even supposed to be working. They got a call for a missing boogie boarder.
“Four of them went in, three of them came out,” he remembered.
The sun had gone down, so they’d have to make the rescue in the dark. Plus, it was a king tide day, with 8- to 12-foot surf.
“It’s a risky, risky operation to start with. I think I said to myself, ‘I don’t know if this is a good idea.’ But also, with my family, I made a pact that like, I’m gonna try, right? If I don’t come home, it’s because I tried, and they don’t expect anything less, especially if it’s something like that in the ocean.”
The team of ocean rescuers were peering out into the darkness as Lyu paddled out on a rescue board. He wore glowsticks on his helmet and his back, and he was equipped with a flashing light on his shoulder.
“I heard a faint yell in the distance.”
He traveled towards the sound, and eventually, he saw the silhouette of a person. He radioed to his command officer.
“I said, ‘I have eyes on him.’ Everyone was shocked. You’re in the dark in the middle of the winter. It was really a long shot for us to do this search and actually find them. And as I pulled up to him he said, ‘Man, I thought I was gonna die out here.’ And I was trying to catch my breath. I said, ‘Well, we ain’t in yet. Just hold on to the board. Let me catch my breath, and then we’ll get in.’”
There was still the matter of getting back — Lyu would have to paddle him all the way back to shore in the freezing cold water.
“So he gets on my rescue board and just as he gets on, a seven to eight foot wave was coming, so I kind of just turned and caught the wave, and we rode that wave all the way back to shore.”
The boogie boarder was safe, and rescued from hypothermia and drowning that night.
Lyu said this is what he was meant to do, and rescues like this prove it to him time and time again.
“I’m built that I’m able to stay calm under pressure, still be able to keep a clear mind and do my job,” he said. “This industry itself, this job is pretty much what I was made for, my calling, giving me the skills to be an ocean rescue man.”
