Baker Beach is not a swimming beach in the way that Ocean Beach is not a swimming beach: the signs say so, the cold says so, and the shorebreak — a particular kind of wave that collapses directly onto the sand with compressive force — says so loudest of all. But people wade in anyway, sometimes just to cast a line, sometimes to cool off, sometimes without thinking much about it. The fisherman on Tuesday appears to have been standing at the water's edge when the wave took him.

The guards who work that stretch of beach are San Francisco Recreation and Parks staff. They are not always there. The beach does not have the staffing of a resort waterfront, and the surf conditions at the western end of the peninsula respond to open-ocean swells that can change fast. What was manageable at noon can look different at two.

There are no names yet attached to either rescue — no official incident report had been released as of Tuesday evening — and the condition of the fisherman after CPR was not immediately confirmed. Reddit's r/sanfrancisco, where the account surfaced, described it as a second consecutive day of emergency response at the same stretch of sand.

Anyone walking down to Baker Beach tomorrow will find the same scene they usually do: the bridge in the near distance, the rocks at the waterline, the posted warnings about cold water and riptide and surf conditions. The waves will be there too. They don't change the signs.