The High Point Volunteer Fire Company in Harvey Cedars, New Jersey, is training on a remote-controlled rescue craft called the Dolphin 3, bought for roughly $10,000, so its volunteers can reach struggling swimmers once Long Beach Island’s lifeguards go back to school.

Labor Day falls on September 7 this year, and Harvey Cedars has already posted what comes after it: a skeleton crew of two beaches, one of them weekends only, running through September 30. Thirteen are guarded now. The ocean does not follow that schedule, and neither do the people who swim in it, which is how a volunteer fire company on a barrier island ends up owning a robot that swims faster than any of its members.

The Dolphin 3 Reaches a Swimmer at 15 MPH Without a Rescuer in the Water

The Dolphin 3 is a self-propelled lifebuoy steered from shore. It carries flotation to a swimmer, who holds on and gets towed back, so no rescuer fights the surf to make first contact. Top speed is 15 mph (24 km/h), with half a mile (800 meters) of control range.

OceanAlpha, the Hong Kong marine robotics company that builds it, rates the Dolphin 3 at 7 meters per second against 3.6 for its first-generation buoy, roughly double. It powers up the instant it touches water, with no startup sequence to wait through. It streams 1080p to a waterproof screen, and it turns for home on its own if the signal drops or the battery falls under 15 percent. Two-second self-righting after a capsize is not standard equipment: OceanAlpha lists it as an upgrade. Departments in Germany, Spain, and Chile are already running the craft.

Assistant Chief Nick Caricato walked NBC10 Philadelphia through the appeal. “It’s going to allow us to put a rescue device in the water quickly,” he said, adding that crews can put it exactly where they want it. A rescuer already in the water can take the controls. Caricato told the station the machine holds up to 1,000 pounds (454 kg), enough for several people in trouble at once to hang on and float until a jet ski gets there.

It is a surface cousin to the airborne rescue hardware DroneXL has tracked for years, including the JX-6A flying lifebuoy.

Harvey Cedars Runs Out of Lifeguards Before It Runs Out of Swimmers

Beach Patrol Chief Randy Townsend is watching his roster shrink in real time. He told NBC10 the patrol loses guards daily as they head back to school, and has already had to close beaches. Caricato put it plainly: come Labor Day, the job falls to the fire department.

The numbers show what that means. Harvey Cedars guards 13 beaches with a full crew through Labor Day. Its post-season schedule covers two: Middlesex Avenue daily and 80th Street on weekends, weather and staffing permitting, through September 30. Chief Paul Rice said the company is training now so it is proficient before that handoff rather than after it, which is the part of this story that separates a purchase from a plan.

Rice’s math on the $10,000 is blunt. “If it saves one life… three times as much would have been worth it,” he said.

Long Beach Island Already Flies the Other Half of This Rescue

The air half of the job is running on the same island. The Ocean County Sheriff’s Office stations drone operators at the north and south ends of Long Beach Island most summer evenings, flying aircraft rigged with Restube flotation packs that inflate on contact with the water.

On July 17, a call came in for two swimmers caught in a rip current off Division Avenue in Surf City. Water rescue trucks, a jet ski, and Harvey Cedars Beach Patrol’s after-hours unit responded, and an OCSO drone operator dropped a Restube that one swimmer grabbed and held until Surf City lifeguards completed the rescue. The sheriff’s office credited coordination between its drone unit and the beach patrol. The aircraft that carried that tube was a DJI Matrice 300 RTK the county cannot legally replace, which is a separate problem and a real one.

So the same stretch of sand now has an aircraft that can put flotation on a swimmer in seconds and, a few miles north, a boat that can bring that swimmer home. Different agencies, different radios.

New York Runs Both Missions Over Four City Beaches

Drone patrols over New York City beaches are split between the NYPD, the FDNY, and NYC Emergency Management. Aircraft fly about 100 yards (91 meters) offshore every day during lifeguard hours at four city beaches, Rockaway among them, watching for sharks and for swimmers in trouble.

The shark half gets the headlines. City Parks counted 16 sharks off Rockaway in the first five days of July, seven of them spotted by NYPD drones, and Rockaway logged 45 shark-related closures this season against 24 at the same point last year, as DroneXL reported in July.

The rescue half is the part Harvey Cedars should study. On June 2, Firefighter Michael Stothers was patrolling the shoreline by drone off Beach 85th Street when he spotted two swimmers struggling. He dropped a Restube within minutes, and both stayed up until rescuers reached them. Lifeguards had gone off duty 20 minutes earlier. That is the exact window Long Beach Island is about to enter, and the city has been dropping flotation at Rockaway since 2025.

Australia Proved This Worked Eight Years Ago

Australia ran the first one. On January 18, 2018, lifeguards at Lennox Head in New South Wales were mid-training on their new Westpac Little Ripper drone when a call came in: two teenagers caught in a 10-foot (3-meter) swell about 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) north of the patrolled beach.

Supervisor Jai Sheridan, the 2017 NSW Lifeguard of the Year, flew out and dropped an inflatable rescue pod. The teenagers grabbed it and swam in, exhausted and unhurt. Sheridan put the whole sequence at one to two minutes, against the several minutes a swimmer would have needed. “The Little Ripper UAV certainly proved itself today,” he said. Deputy Premier John Barilaro called it a world first.

Those drones were bought to watch for sharks, under a AU$16 million state shark mitigation strategy run jointly by Surf Life Saving NSW and the state’s Department of Primary Industries. The surveillance mission kept growing from there, and DroneXL has followed it through Surf Life Saving Queensland’s fleet, a pilot’s great white warning at Mollymook, and Queensland’s four-year SharkSmart trial, which found drones detected more than twice as many sharks as nets and drum lines while killing nothing.

DroneXL’s Take

Eight years separate Jai Sheridan’s improvised pod drop from a volunteer fire company buying its own rescue robot off the shelf. That is the whole story. Uncrewed lifesaving stopped being a world-first headline and became a line item a volunteer fire company can put in its budget.

Give the skeptics their point: a Dolphin 3 is not a lifeguard. It cannot read a rip current from the sand, cannot decide who to reach first, and cannot start compressions when the swimmer comes in. Rice bought a tool, not a staffing solution, and every guard Harvey Cedars fails to hire next June is still a real loss. But the September gap on a barrier island was never going to be hired away. It gets closed with response time, and $10,000 buys a machine that beats a swimmer to the victim on the worst day of the year.

What I want to watch is whether anyone puts both halves in one set of hands. Long Beach Island has an aerial Restube dropper working evenings and a surface tow craft in a Harvey Cedars firehouse, run by two different agencies. The drone finds the swimmer and keeps them up, which is what Stothers did at Beach 85th Street. The boat brings them in. Nobody on that island has flown one while driving the other yet.

The test comes fast. On September 8 Harvey Cedars drops from thirteen guarded beaches to two, and the water stays warm well into October.

Sources: NBC10 Philadelphia, Borough of Harvey Cedars, Shore News Network, QNS, ABC7 New York, Surf Life Saving NSW, CBS News, OceanAlpha

DroneXL uses automated tools to support research and source retrieval. All reporting and editorial perspectives are by Haye Kesteloo.