As always surfing teaches much about this. Fighting the current is futile and achieves nothing but exhaustion and likely the need of others to come to your aid

As always surfing teaches much about this. Fighting the current is futile and achieves nothing but exhaustion and likely the need of others to come to your aid once you give up. If you simply move laterally (while fighting just enough to not go backwards) you soon reach a point where you can making easy progress forward again, and then once ashore take a direct simple path to where you wanted to go.