Save Newport Real News in Newport Beach
Last week, instead of merely reporting the news, I actually witnessed a pretty miraculous story first-hand for a change!
A quick backstory: Friends and neighbors of mine, Mike and Linda Kuhar, have a beautiful African Savannah cat named Olive which is an F3, meaning that it is just 3 breedings away from a fully wild Savannah, which has a territorial range of several miles, and their cat even wears a GPS collar to ensure that she doesn’t get lost.
Olive, often a visitor to nearby Bay Island, was likely scared by a nearby dog and somehow fell off the seawall and into the bay. The seawalls on Bay Island were just redone about two years ago, and the outside of the walls are extremely clean and beautiful. If you’re a cat in the water, smooth walls are not a good scenario for you. Thankfully, Savannahs are a loud cat. How loud? A resident from Harbor Island heard the screams of their swimming kitten from across the harbor as she was grasping on to the breakwall for dear life, and called Harbor Patrol to take a look.
The boat arrived just in time.
As Olive was struggling to escape the 58 degree water, the Harbor Patrol improvised a device to reach her, as the waters were to shallow for the boat to reach her directly as the boat would run ashore. Attaching a flotation device to a pole, they were able to bring the cat aboard the boat, saving it from the fight of its life. While there is no video of this incident, Deputy Jason Mann and his partner (whose name I do not have, sorry!) deserve full credit for being the ones to take a panicked cat out of the water with their bare hands.
Thankfully, the cat had a collar on with the Kuhar telephone number and the Harbor Patrol delivered Olive back to her house, where her owners Mike and Linda awaited her arrival (I was talking to them as they awaited the Habor Patrol to get there!)
After a warmwater bath to bring up her body temperature, she spent the next several hours shivering from her adventure and staying in her padded bed under a towel. Special thanks to Jason Mann and his team for this unique rescue.
