A MOTHER who saved a seven-year-old boy from drowning at a Bournemouth beach, has asked the public to be more vigilant.

Nicola Dorrington has asked the public to be vigilant at the beach, after the boy went unnoticed in the water at 11am on Tuesday, August 10, at Alum Chine.

She has urged people to check out anything that doesn’t look right because “a drowned child doesn’t look like what you would think. People were coming in and out of the sea, walking past him and playing right by him and they still didn’t notice.”

Ms Dorrington was sat on the beach watching her own children when the incident happened.

She said: “In the corner of my eye I saw something that I just didn’t like the look of.

“I then saw a hand so I realised that it was somebody but because it was so shallow and people were playing with a ball right by him. I kind of thought well surely if I’m sat on the sand, if it was something then the people who were very close to this would notice it.”

“We were also sat right in front of the lifeguard hut too, so you know I’m thinking well if it’s a body then the lifeguards would have seen it.

“I had some sort of instinct to go and check it out anyway, so I ran over and stood over the boy and because the water was dark and he had dark shorts on, he didn’t look like what I thought a floating body would look like.

“He was kind of curled up on his front so I still wasn’t really sure what it was going to be until I pulled it out.

“I pulled it out and realised it was a child, he was all floppy and he was unconscious, he had all this foam coming out of his mouth and I just screamed as much as I could.”

“I don’t really know what happened from there, I think a lifeguard came and took him away and I couldn’t go near them because I was so worried about whether or not he was dead and whether they were going to bring him back to life.”

“Obviously they were amazing and the lifeguards brought him back to life and within twenty minutes he was walking around but the thing is, if I did leave that unnoticed because everyone else was leaving it unnoticed, it could have been a completely different situation.”

Following the incident Ms Dorrington said: “I feel like I will never be able to relax at the beach again and I hope everyone that saw what happened is okay because I can’t sleep at night.

“All I’m thinking about is what if I was doing something else and I wasn’t looking at the water, it was traumatic for everybody and the lifeguards, it was not a nice situation at all.”

She emphasised the public of the importance of teaching your children beach safety, especially if you’re attending for the first time over the summer holidays and that if you’re going to leave your child to go somewhere, make sure you leave them with a responsible person that will watch over them.