00:00A call to triple zero no one wants to make.
00:06I said I need helicopters, I need planes, I need boats. My family's out of sea.
00:13Thirteen-year-old Austin Appleby had just swam four kilometres to shore after he, his mum and siblings,
00:2012-year-old Beau and 8-year-old Grace, were swept out to sea while on inflatable kayaks and paddle boards off Geograph Bay.
00:28One of the hardest decisions I ever had to make was to say to Austin, try and get to shore and get some help.
00:33It's got to get really serious really quickly.
00:36Which it did. The winds getting stronger and the waves bigger, making Austin swim that much harder and pushing his family further away from shore.
00:45I was scared, confused, frightened.
00:49The trio spending more than eight hours in the ocean before being saved.
00:53Towards the end, a big wave hit all of a sudden and we were, me and my little sister, we were like on a weird angle and it flipped us off and we floated away from mum.
01:06The three pulled from the water soon after, having drifted 14 kilometres out to sea.
01:12And I didn't know where they were and how they were and I thought they were dead. I had a lot of guilt in my heart.
01:17Because, you know, I thought, oh man, I wasn't fast enough. I wasn't fast enough.
01:21The Applebee's now counting their blessings.
01:24All three of them made it. That was all that mattered.
01:27It was good. Good outcome.
01:30And now they can conquer the world and do everything that I wasn't able to do.
01:34So they're going to make all three heroes out of them.
Comments