[haunting music plays]
[tense music plays]
That area of South Africa's called the Wild Coast,
and there's a lot of ships that have sunk around that area.
It's got major storms and major different, uh, weather patterns.
And so it was really stormy before we even left the dock.
So we were definitely going out into stormy weather.
I went to bed at about half past nine in the evening.
Then, all of a sudden, there was a deathly quiet
and the lights went out.
And I could feel the ship rolling.
But there was just deathly silence.
And then one of the magicians
banged on my door and said, "You've gotta get out now.
We've lost power."
[grim musical sting]
And it was sort of eerie because it's so quiet,
and yet the ship's moving, rolling from side to side,
and it's dark.
-[eerie music playing] -[wind whistling]
She mobilized all of us and told us what to do
because there were no officers as such
that were telling us what to do.
She told us not to tell anybody that we're sinking.
At this point, she didn't even know we were sinking.
She told us just go and get everybody
and say we're having a problem with the engines
and that the power's gone off
and we need everybody in the main lounge.
[grim musical sting]
At half past 11, Lorraine had been to the bridge
and they'd realized there was no ways
that we could save the ship.
[grim music playing]
People are getting more worried.
The people are nervous.
We're having to split fathers from the mothers and kids.
And so the tension is definitely mounting.
And it's windy and cold.
And you can feel that
the sea is rough, really rough.
The chief engineer and the chief officer and safety officer
got off on the first lifeboat.
So they were gone.
[wind whistling]
Sitting there, you can see
people start to get more and more,
um, uptight and the tension is definitely mounting.
And it was an open boat with iron bars across the top
and we hung suspended for about an hour
waiting to be lowered.
In the wind, howling, just waiting with the kids,
just waiting to make sure the other boats
had cleared so that we could be lowered.
And all of a sudden, you just...
it was just, like, released.
And remember, you're in a two-three story building almost.
That's how high you are on one of the bigger ships like this.
And we were just smacked down into the water.
And that was when the frightening part really started.
Because once we hit the water, you've got no control.
-[wind whistling] -[boat creaking]
After smacking against the side of the ship once or twice more,
we managed to row ourselves away.
And we were just sitting in the trough of these waves,
going up and down, up and down.
Being bashed around with winds howling.
We didn't know where we were going.
It was dark, about one o'clock in the morning.
I felt responsible for them,
but I felt like I was losing control.
We couldn't even see over the top of the troughs of the waves,
so we all just sank to the bottom of the boat
and stayed like that.
And people were then being seasick.
It was windy. It was cold.
Um, they were whimpering.
And we were just trying to row.
We were rowing into nothingness, into nowhere.
We didn't know where we were going or what we were doing.
[soft SOS beeping]
[distant helicopter blades thumping]
At 4:30 in the morning, we saw the helicopters.
So we thought, "Oh, great. They're...
coming to rescue us."
But the helicopters were going
in a completely different direction.
They were heading to the ship.
We just sat there. We just... We're now exhausted,
tired, sick.
And we're just rolling around in the sea.
At about five o'clock in the morning,
there was a big Norwegian cargo vessel.
This huge, big ship loomed.
So we thought, "Great, we can try and be rescued by them."
Then it got worse.
Instead of getting better, it got worse.
Because again, as you come against the side of this vessel,
we were being smacked into the vessel.
And the iron bars at the top of our little wooden boat
started getting flung off.
The boat started to leak.
The moms and kids were screaming.
And we couldn't...
There's no ways we could jump onto this tall, big ship.
There's no ways you could jump or throw kids.
So we started to scream at them to go away.
Because we were now losing our boat
and we were gonna start taking on water.
They did eventually move away.
And we moved ourselves away.
The moms are crying at this point, the kids were upset.
Everybody was really rattled.
And really... Now we thought we were gonna drown.
Two of us were sort of looking around
to see if we could see anything.
And instead of seeing anybody or anything
or any helicopter or anybody coming to save us,
we saw some sharks.
The area is notorious for sharks
in South Africa.
That whole Transkei Coast
has got white sharks.
And so I knew if we went into the water,
we'd really be in trouble.
-[thunder rumbling] -[grim music playing]
Now we were really panicking.
'Cause we knew this was the third time
we were gonna start smacking into the side of a vessel.
And when you look up, you're looking up
at a three to four tier building.
And we were all looking up at the side
and screaming at them to go away.
They were screaming down in Polish,
and we were screaming up at them in English,
and Afrikaans or any language we could think of.
And nobody was making any sense.
Greek. Everything was being flung around.
And it was chaos.
Eventually, one of the sailors
got a rope and swung himself into our lifeboat.
By this time, we were taking in a lot of water.
And we still didn't know how we could get everybody up.
But they were brilliant.
They had... They took their crane,
the crane from the side of the ship,
and they swung it over the side
and they attached a lobster netting
to the end of the crane,
and they swung it down into the boat.
[dramatic musical sting]
So they would take one kid,
put the kid into the lobster netting,
pull him up in the net,
onto the side of the ship.
And of course the mother didn't want to let go.
The mothers wanted to go with their kids.
And I wouldn't allow it.
And the kids of course are screaming, crying,
but it didn't matter at this point.
And eventually, we just said, "Please, let them go.
We have to do this. We're sinking."
And we were all still waiting
and just being flung around all over the boat.
And then they put Lorraine's granny in.
This poor little 81-year-old.
She was flung into this lobster net
and yanked up onto the side of the ship.
And in all that time, the boat is taking on water.
It was a miracle we managed to get them up.
[dramatic music playing]
I just watched it in slow motion, going down.
I saw the last of the deck chairs going into the water
and then the end of the boat going under.
The people that were rescued, the ordeal wasn't over for them
because half of them had left a family member on the ship.
And we didn't know what was happening.
Well, the next 24 hours, nobody knew who was rescued,
who was alive, who was not alive.
All the moms and the kids
had no idea where Dad was.
[dramatic music continues]
I survived because we had such a great team
who all worked together on the Oceanos, then we all
knew how to react in a crisis.
But also, we were very, very lucky.