Kangaroo rescued after swimming out to sea at Brighton Beach

A kangaroo ventured far from home this morning when it was spotted splashing about at an Adelaide beach.

Paul Kennedy first spotted the roo at 5.30am while on his daily morning walk along the shore of Brighton Beach.

"Straight in front of me a kangaroo hopped from the road, across the sand and straight into the water and started paddling out," Mr Kennedy said.

The adventurous kangaroo left lifeguards from the Brighton Surf Lifesaving Club tasked with a rescue like never before.

"We saw it and thought it was a dog, then realised it was a kangaroo," Dayna Blyth, a lifeguard who was training in a boat at the time, said.

"We gave it a rescue tube to see if it would hold onto it, and it tried, so then I jumped in the water and pushed it up onto the sand."

But that wasn't the end of the rescue mission.

Once it reached the shore, the kangaroo turned around and hopped in for second splash.

"We got our boat as close as we could next to it and I literally just lent over and pulled it into the boat as you would with any other rescue," Regan Smallacombe, the other lifeguard onboard, said.

After two rescue attempts, the kangaroo was finally brought to land.

The only safe place to keep the kangaroo was an empty bin at the lifesaving club, where it waits for an animal rescue group to collect it.