00:02He certainly is a remarkable young man.
00:04And if he had not made that swim, who knows what the outcome would have been.
00:11Certainly if the alarm was a couple of hours later, we'd have been looking for the family
00:16in the Indian Ocean.
00:18So tell us about when you first heard about this family in trouble.
00:23So I got a call personally at about 6.30, a little bit after that maybe, to go out with
00:33a crew and I was navigator on one of the two crews that went from Busselton.
00:40We launched sometime shortly before seven with coordinates to go to, to join the search
00:47over which Naturalist had started already.
00:50Yeah.
00:51And how did you pin down where they possibly would be?
00:57Well, the information that Austin gave the police was fed into a computer modelling system,
01:06which is used to predict drift.
01:09And that was finally tweaked by a naturalist who found the kayak on their way out to the
01:18rescue.
01:19And so the system had another coordinate, which actually altered our search position by about
01:28one nautical mile, maybe one and a half.
01:30Wow.
01:32It finished up very close to the casualties.
01:35And so what was it like when you came upon them?
01:39Well, it was pretty rough.
01:42Rescue 2, the vessel that I was on, wasn't fitted out for rough weather and the whole crew
01:48was soaked.
01:49I remember the skipper asked me to write something down and I had nowhere to write that wasn't
01:55wet.
01:58But that's part of the problem with the sea at night.
02:01Of course, you can't see the waves coming, so you can't avoid them.
02:04And so was it pitch black at that stage?
02:07Yes, absolutely.
02:09But there were four boats, the helicopter and the jet, looking for this little family.
02:15And the boat I was on is fitted with night vision.
02:20We all have Fleur, but we were carrying night vision as well.
02:24So we were running dark and the other boats were using spotlights to try and find them.
02:30And did you come across the mother and children yourself or were they taken on board another
02:35boat?
02:36No, I was on Busselton Rescue 2.
02:39Rescue 1 was actually closer to them.
02:42They were only about 150 metres when the helicopter made the call that they'd found them.
02:49We were about another 100 or so metres further behind.
02:54And once the mother and then the two children were taken on board Rescue 1, almost immediately
03:00we found the paddle boards and picked them up.
03:03All right.
03:03And when you were out there at that moment, what were you thinking about the chances of Austin
03:11in those conditions having swum all the way back to shore to raise the alarm?
03:19Well, we had been told that he'd swum for over two hours.
03:22And as a navigator, I looked at my plot and tried to estimate where he'd made landfall.
03:28But we didn't know that he had swum directly back into the weather to take him back to the
03:35Quindalup beach line, which would have been very hard going until the last two or 300 metres,
03:43where the land would have washed out the wind issues and it would have been much flatter.
03:52That's probably one of the things that helped him.
03:55But certainly a courageous swim before he got to that area.
03:59Have you got to meet him yet?
04:01No.
04:02No.
04:04In fact, naturalists were the lead authority in the area.
04:08So the search took place in naturalist area.
04:11We were calling to support them.
04:13It's just that where we were on the search line is how we came to be the people who picked
04:20him up.
04:20Yeah.
04:21Would you like to meet him?
04:23And what are the lessons to be learned from this and the example that Austin sets?
04:28Well, two things.
04:30One is that if you really put your mind to it, you can do something quite special.
04:38But the other thing is that in a beach resort area like this, with a southerly breeze, I understand
04:46that our beach line in Western Australia, most of it is north-south.
04:50Here in Busselton, it's east-west, which means a southerly wind takes you straight out into
04:55the sea.
04:56But the first 200 metres is really great.
04:59It's fine to play and paddle in, but you can't see the whitecaps, which are created by
05:04the wind, just that bit further out in the more dangerous area.
05:07That's the one where we can get this issue as well.
05:10Alright, so I'll see you later.
05:10Bye.
Comments