How did this captain know, from fifty feet away, what the father couldn’t recognize from just ten? Drowning is not the violent, splashing, call for help that most people expect. The captain was trained to recognize drowning by experts and years of experience. The father, on the other hand, had learned what drowning looks like by watching television. [...]

The Instinctive Drowning Response – so named by Francesco A. Pia, Ph.D.,

is what people do to avoid actual or perceived suffocation in the water.

And it does not look like most people expect.

There is very little splashing, no waving, and no yelling or calls for help of any kind.