I had one before my first year at University.

I just turned 18 at the time and it was literally the week before I moved away to Uni. Me and 6 of my friends decided to go to the beach, the first hour was pretty chill. One thing you could notice though was that the beach was extremely wide - it took us like 15 minutes of walking just to get to the water, and then another 8-10 mins in the water for it to get deep enough to swim.


So 4 of us are in the water, the other two are chilling on the sand. We're enjoying the waves, messing around, and as a joke all of us decided to take our swimming shorts off. We're butt ass naked, catching waves, laughing and overall having fun.


Around 30-40 minutes later, we decided its enough and it's time to go back. We look behind us, and to our surprise...the whole beach is covered in water.


We're thinking "oh okay, it'll be just a tougher walk back."


Well, it turned out that we were standing on some sort of sand hill, and the whole way back was actually deep, none of us could touch the floor and the waves were only getting stronger. We started swimming back, none of us were laughing anymore with worried looks on our faces. We barley could see people on the other side, the waves were starting to pull us back and we were literally swimming for our lives.


2 guys started panicking, saying they're getting cramps, we're trying to help them while we're barley staying afloat at this point with our muscles getting tired - and remember we're still butt ass naked.


This is when the craziest thoughts started to rise up - "Am I going to see my mom again?", "I don't want to die", and other messed up thoughts.


But we had no other choice to keep going although I genuinely thought this was the end - after what felt for eternity we made it to the shore. All I remember is that I had a crazy arm pump, and some guy told us he called the coast guards to save us (they sent up a helicopter and two boats looking for us lol)


We called them saying everything is okay and not to look for us, and then we went to a restaurant and drove home.


For the future I'll always look out for the tide and never go deep in the ocean again