Catalina residents and friends can wish two retiring Baywatch lifeguards farewell on June 2, as they move into new, possibly less exciting, lives off the Island.
Joel Gitelson, 64, and Kevin Marble, 56, each served the Island for 23 years, largely as part of the heroic paramedic lifeguard team we know as Baywatch. Gitelson retired officially in 2012 and Marble’s last day was March 28 of this year.
It was the unique opportunity to work as both a lifeguard and a paramedic that drew Marble to the Island in 1986.
Catalina residents and friends can wish two retiring Baywatch lifeguards farewell on June 2, as they move into new, possibly less exciting, lives off the Island.
Joel Gitelson, 64, and Kevin Marble, 56, each served the Island for 23 years, largely as part of the heroic paramedic lifeguard team we know as Baywatch. Gitelson retired officially in 2012 and Marble’s last day was March 28 of this year.
It was the unique opportunity to work as both a lifeguard and a paramedic that drew Marble to the Island in 1986.
“Baywatch encompasses all kinds of rescue,” Marble said. “Land, water, underwater … perfect for my adrenaline junky lifestyle and desire to be a care provider for people when they really need help the most.”
One of his two Medals of Honor from the county of Los Angeles came from helping save Pelican Magic, a 109-foot tug that came to grief during a sea trial. When Marble arrived the aft deck was awash and the engine room was 6-feet under water.
Marble dove below the boat and used four toilet bowl wax rings (which he swears are the best tools for plugging below water hull breaches that money can buy), to seal the finger-width gap caused when the shaft uncoupled at the transmission and slipped.
“We were able to solve that with $4 worth of materials, and the tug made it home under it’s own power,” Marble said.
Saving three fishermen on a 50-foot commercial vessel at the West End Cove in 1997 was one of Marble’s most dramatic rescues. Their steel trawler had run aground one night fully loaded with squid.
The eight-foot surf washed the decks and rocked the boat from rail to rail, smashing it starboard on the rocks with each wave. Neither the rescue boat nor the Coast Guard helicopter could get close due to the lobster traps, heavy kelp and high swell so it was up to Marble to retrieve the men by swimming.
He left an inflatable raft with a tow rope in the kelp and swam to the wildly rocking boat, timing his approach so the port side would be low and lift him up with the next swell. Each fisherman took turns donning an inflatable rescue tube, waiting for the port rail to kiss the water, do a belly flop and start swimming like mad for the raft. Marble went back and forth with each one, slogging through leaking diesel and squid churning in the water. No one was injured but the steel vessel was a complete loss, smashed to bits by the next morning on the rocks.
As a member of the Hyperbaric Chamber Volunteer Crew Dive Team amd the LA County Fire Department Underwater Rescue and Recovery Unit, Marble has treated a number of cardiac arrest cases in divers.
“We could not have saved so many without the hyperbaric chamber,” Marble said, and blames his shocking white hair on using a paddle-type defibrillator on a wet deck. “It’s the white hair that makes me and Joel look so much alike,” he said.
Despite the eight year difference in age, the two were often mistaken for one another and were dubbed the Grey Squad. They worked as paramedic partners in a “young man’s job” through the 2006 devastating fire disaster up until Gitelson’s retirement in 2012.
For Marble, who started a family on the Island, the friendships with locals is already the primary thing he misses about leaving Catalina.
“People at the Isthmus particularly get very close because there are only about 75 – 100 year round residents,” Marble said. “I’ll miss the camaraderie. They treated me and my girls like family.”
Marble and Gitelson look forward to sharing a BYOB Potluck BBQ on June 2nd with friends and residents from noon to 4 p.m. at the Isthmus.
