The sea appeared calm, occasional 2-foot waves rolling in, when Kalei Kolivas jumped 6 feet into the water from the black lava rock and coral ledge that gave the spot, China Walls, its name.

It looked safe to the unpracticed eye that afternoon of Sept. 1, with local surfers getting fun rides.

Waiting for a wave, surfer Sean Parsa, 38, saw Kolivas, 18, and knew from experience that appearances were deceptive. There are strong currents and conditions can suddenly change at the unguarded slice of shore in the Portlock neighborhood of Hawaii Kai.

“I saw a big, closed-out set coming in,” Parsa recalled in an interview Saturday at China Walls. He shouted to Kolivas to swim farther out, beyond the break, but the waves caught and pushed her under. She waved for help, and as Parsa and another surfer, Jesse Yonover, raced toward her she vanished beneath the third wave, which rose above the ledge before dissolving into a morass of churning foam.

Parsa found Kolivas floating unconscious beneath the surface and pulled her out. Stretching her slight frame atop his 5-foot, 5-inch surfboard with Yonover’s help, he immediately began CPR. Parsa did compressions, pushing rhythmically on her breastbone to try and restart her heart, and blew air into her mouth but detected “no heartbeat, no breath, nothing.”

He said he was surprised at how calm he and Yonover, who knew each other only by sight in the surf, remained as they worked to revive Kolivas on the unstable, bobbing board.

“It definitely crossed my mind we’d have to haul this girl’s dead body up the wall,” Yonover, 29, recalled. When a bodyboarder came and helped hold the board steady, Parsa pushed until “I thought I had broken her ribs, and then tons of foam came out of her mouth and nose, and she started breathing again.” She opened her eyes and they asked her name. “Kalei,” she said, to their immense relief.

Within five minutes, the surfers said, a lifeguard swam out to them, followed in 10 minutes by two more lifeguards on a personal watercraft who transported Kolivas to an ambulance onshore.

On Friday at 9 a.m., Parsa, Yonover and the city’s Emergency Services first responders who helped Kolivas will be honored in a ceremony at Mayor Kirk Caldwell’s office at Honolulu Hale.

While they and other surfers have often warned and assisted visitors to safety at China Walls, Parsa and Yonover said they were surprised Kolivas was a local girl who’d grown up in Hawaii Kai, like themselves.

China Walls has lately seen a surge in visitors due to social media and travel websites. Because the ocean is unpredictable, there is a need for more ocean preparedness education among the public, said Jim Howe, Emergency Services director.

“We have done everything in our power to try and convince people not to go down (to China Walls),” Howe said in a phone interview. Accessed through Koko Kai Beach Mini Park, he said the area has been used by shore fishermen for 100 years and became a popular surfing spot in the 1970s. “The issue is battling social media,” he added, along with the fact that local surfers “make it look really easy.”

China Walls is a hot spot for emergency services, patrolled all day by lifeguards on personal watercraft during big south swells that can sweep across the ledge and knock people into the water, Howe said. Residents can help on an everyday basis by “giving visitors the benefit of our knowledge and experience by sharing with them, it may look very easy but you don’t want to go in the water here.” Anyone who sees an emergency should dial 911 and not jump in to help unless trained.

As for Kolivas, she remembers being tossed around, fighting her way to the surface, weakening and swallowing a lot of water. The third wave drove her to the bottom, where she struck her head.

“I was getting tired, waiting for a small wave to boost me back onto the rocks as I usually do. When the wave came it was bigger than I was expecting because it had been pretty flat all day, so I (tried to dive) under.

“Next thing I remember I was waking up on a surfboard, coughing up a lot of water, there were a lot of people surrounding me, I was freezing, everything seemed very bright and blurry,” Kolivas said.

Asked how she felt that day in the ocean, “I drowned,” Kolivas said, her voice barely audible above waves washing against the cliff.

“I remember her looking at us with the widest eyes I’ve ever seen, as if she’d just seen a ghost,” Yonover said.

Parsa had brought along his 6-month-old twins, Lily and Kai Parsa, to the interview. It was because they were born prematurely that he had learned CPR, he said.

Kolivas, smiling, thanked the twins.

Kalei Kolivas is the niece of Star-Advertiser staff writer Mindy Pennybacker.