Man overboard!
And that's when I grabbed the hook knife
and basically every solo
sailor's worst nightmare: cut the jack-line.
and I had to because if I didn't,
I was going to drown anyway.
This isn't a drill.
This is the real thing.
Falling overboard.
Every sailor's worst nightmare.
What if you fell into three meter
swells in shark infested water
and you were the only person on board?
What are your chances of survival?
What are the mental implications?
Could you have prevented it?
And could you return to the boat
after such a traumatic ordeal?
There are so many questions
to this scenario,
and we're here to answer them
with the help of Nigel Fox.
Man overboard survivor
who was rescued off the
Arafura Sea off northern Australia.
We should at this point,
thank Nigel for talking to us,
because this event happened
only in January.
And invariably there were some long term
mental implications to this ordeal.
And, of course,
there are many lessons that we as
sailors can learn from this experience.
After Nige's wife died of cancer,
he decided the best way to heal
and to go through
the grieving process was to sail.
He bought his Nigel Duncanson, 34
sloop sailing yacht Bison,
having sailed up
the east coast of Australia
into the demanding
seas of the Torres Strait
and west to Darwin.
His plan was to sail to Asia.
But after the pandemic hit,
he revised his plans
and decided to turn back
and spend some time
in the Great Barrier Reef.
We'll let Nige set the scene.
Yeah, well, it's been absolute
**** of a sail from Darwin.
There's like five different tides
you got to basically get in
unison to get out.
You go to get them all correctly in time,
otherwise you're going backwards.
There's a constant four knot current
that goes east to west, basically
along the top of Australia.
I had to wait for the
northern monsoon to kick in.
Leave it for a couple of weeks
to set in
and basically reverse the current
and obviously, the winds.
I mean, the weather conditions
were basically dreadful.
It was all two to three metre
swells the whole way.
There were generally about
it was all about 120 degrees off one, port
or starboard quarter aft,
plus the winds.
so I couldn't
even do a true wing on wing.
So, I mean, the whole sail
across was nasty.
And when I got to the Wessels
I would have normally
dropped the hook and gone back
through the hole in the wall,
which is one of those
kind of must do things.
But the weather was so bad,
it was basically
the length of the Wessel Islands
with just electrical storms.
I'm coming up to it
and all I can see is basically horizon
and horizon of clouds and just lightning.
That was it.
Some of you might be questioning why
Nide left when he did.
Well, if you don't know it,
northern Australia
can be pretty tough sailing.
I spoke to Lee of Santorini and Lee and
Jason had done the trip the other way.
And Lee actually said it was the toughest
sail that they have ever done.
So we can't really question
When Nige left,
I think he left at the right time
after the monsoons changed.
Of course, he had his Iridium Go,
so he was getting 24 hour weather updates
and he was logging his passage
with his friend Ian in Melbourne.
Nige mentioned the hole in the wall,
which is known as the Gugari Rip,
which would have saved him
going around the Cape of the Wessel
Islands and shaved off
around 60 nautical miles
from his journey.
But this is a narrow, rocky passage
with confused seas.
So under the conditions he was in,
it made sense to avoid it.
So he logged his revised
plans with his friend Ian turned to port
and went up the west
side of the Wessel Islands.
It was nighttime
and the wind was reaching 40 knots
and there was an electrical storm
directly in front of him.
So as he rounded
the tip of the Wessel Islands,
he put the engine on.
Now, at this point,
it was really getting up.
The winds were getting up.
The swell was getting up.
He was being buffeted by the waves.
So he got something to eat.
He knew it needed to get something
inside him immediately,
but that was when problems
really began to start.
Got everything tidied away,
got it back on course.
Somewhere in the process
of getting back into the cockpit,
got thrown in.
And that did two ribs.
So I've gone up round the Wessel's overnight.
The following morning,
Went to start furling the headsail
and the furler jammed!
and somehow the port-side headsheet
managed to wrap itself around the lower cable
of the stainless steel stanchions
and tied itself in a knot.
I think we've all been there
when things go wrong,
they come in threes. Now Nige
at this point
had mentioned that
he was starting to get fatigued
and this is not to be underestimated.
As you know, when you're tired,
you can make bad
decisions or worse still,
not make a decision at all.
So Nige had done the
right thing by grabbing a bite to eat
at the appropriate moment.
But with a twisted furling line,
things were starting to get bad
and they were going from bad to worse.
Anyway, I've set the bearing
got my gear on so I
put on a pair of shorts,
shirt, life jacket,
hooked on the jackline, clipped on .
And as I'm stepping out of the cockpit,
there was literally another set of swells,
and I don't know if you've seen this yourself,
another set of swells
quite literally coming into
ninety degrees to the primary steps
that are coming in behind me,
and they're doing about twice the speed.
What Nige is describing here is Cross Seas.
This is where you get two bodies
of ocean meeting,
which creates a crisscross
pattern of swells.
And it's most common around capes,
which makes sense considering
Nige's location at this point.
Yeah, we saw things when we were crossing
from the Andaman Sea
into the Indian Ocean
when we were heading towards Indonesia .
They were absolutely nothing
like Nige's conditions at all
but they did make for confusing seas
and they were quite difficult to sail in.
In Nige's scenario
these seas were dangerous.
And as we're about to find out,
they spelled disaster.
That came in and basically hit the boat
beam-on and of course, this is
an old IRC designed boat so she's
got a big fat belly on.
Bang! It's just put her on her beam-ends.
It just flip me clean
over the stanchions. Next thing
I know I'm on the other side
going "what the ***?'. The good old jackline
being what it was
wrapped itself around the right leg
at the knee. That caused tension
on a length of jack-line, just a perfect length
to look over the stanchions and hold me
that sort of angle, head
and shoulders down
on the wrong side of them.
Every time she went for a wave,
it pushed my head
and shoulders underwater.
And I'm in a two to
three metre swell and... drown....
Drown. Drown.
Obviously, you don't want to be
in that position for too long
for self-preservation kicks in.
And that's when I
grabbed the hook, knife and did
basically every solo
sailor's worst nightmare...
Cut the jack-line.
And I had to, because if I didn't,
I was going to drown anyway, regardless.
So I cut the line
as it dropped me into the water
Actually, I had had hold
the tow-rail with my left hand
I threw the hook knife
back into the cockpit with my right hand,
and worked my way around
to the back of the boat.
Oh my God.
Horrible.
Sickening.
I would have been sick to the teeth.
I can't even begin to imagine
what that must have been like,
what was going through
his head at the time.
And of course, to make matters worse,
he's in a four knot current,
very strong current.
He was all alone, all on his own.
Fortunately, Nige has a Hydrovane,
which is a self steering
mechanism mounted
to the back of the boat.
So with one hand clasping the toe rail,
he made his way round
to the back of the boat
and he grabbed the Hydrovane.
But don't forget
of course that the boat is moving up
and down like this
in the horrendous seas.
And it made it very difficult.
So when he grabbed
hold of the Hydrovane he looked up
to size up his escape.
And this is when his nightmare
was about to be realised.
And I'm going "Yeah, I can do this".
And then, boom!
The bloody lifejacket
self-inflated!
And the drag from the bloody
lifejacket, dragged me off the boat.
And I'm just like "well that's ***".
I'm just like "Really?"
I mean, you've got to admire the man
for being able to laugh about it now.
I should think it was
very different at the time
as he watched his boat
disappear completely from view
with his cat, Stinky,
the only person on board.
I can't imagine.
And to make matters worse
he had had his held VHF
clipped on to his lifejacket
but when it inflated
he thinks that the hand-held got caught
around the Hydrovane and had ripped off.
So he lost that, too.
Fortunately, he didn't lose his PLB,
his personal life beacon,
and he was able to clip it
onto the back of his neck
with the antenna upwards,
leaving both his hands free.
We're going to talk
about the PLB in a little bit
more detail in a moment,
because it is the crux of the story.
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We return to Nige who talks
about his personal life beacon,
which essentially saved his life.
With the Ocean Signal
PLB here in Australia
to fit Australian regulations
it gets its own little life jacket
so it can float.
Obviously, primarily, it's just
the unit on his own, you know,
it won't float.
But eventually you just
kind of settle down.
And I actually found
I adjusted the leg straps,
which bizarrely enough,
when you adjust the legs up,
it pulls your feet up, but actually turns you
facing into the waves.
So hands under water cos up here
it really is
thick with tiger sharks.
Sorry, did he just say tiger sharks?
They grow to about five, six meters.
Their teeth have evolve to bite
through turtle shells.
They are a nocturnal hunter
But even so, I kept my hands
underwater, sculling.
And just kept my head, basically,
the back of my head to the waves.
Sea survival 101.
Keep your head to the back of the waves
and your hood up
a life jacket without a hood in
these conditions could spell disaster.
The primary thing with a hood
is secondary drowning.
And if you're out in that sort of sea
without a hood
or you're just in a regular life jacket,
water ingestion will, over time,
slowly drown you.
And of course, there's
a triple layer of nasty here,
because not only is salt water
corrosive to your lungs,
as it's drowning you
it's actually dehydrating you
at the same time.
OK, so he's in two meter swells,
he's almost drowned.
He's lost his boat.
He's lost his cat.
He's dehydrated, got broken ribs,
got broken ribs as well.
Oh, my God.
He has got his PLB,
the one thing he's got going for him.
Obviously, he still got his life
jacket on and his PLB is working.
How on earth do you deal with that?
Yeah.
Well, I asked him this actually.
I was curious to know
at that point in time
what was his primary concern?
Keeping quiet
acoustically, quiet in the water,
trying to keep the back
of my head to the waves
so I don't suffer
from secondary drowning.
You just got to put
all the negative thoughts away.
There was a mental preservation
that there was something that kicked in
that stopped you from thinking
the worst of the situation, I suppose.
But how were you thinking
when when the boat was disappearing?
You know, it went back quickly.
I barely noticed it.
The boat was
was doing six and a half knots.
She was gone like a bullet from a barrel.
And your view from
down there at water level
actually isn't that good.
So you don't get to see
the boat for long. It was gone. And at that stage
I'd quite literally
mentally just written it off.
With the boat having disappeared
over the horizon and now floating
in shark infested waters.
How did he survive?
What happened to his boat?
And possibly even more importantly,
what happened to Stinky the Cat?
In the next episode
we're going to be discussing his rescue
by the Australian
Maritime Safety Authority
4th of January this year,
the answer response center
responded to the activation
of a personal locator beacon
about 100 kilometers
north of Gove in the Northern Territory.
Upon activation
We identified that the locator beacon
was registered to a yacht,
and we could see
the yacht was heading in one direction
and the beacon was stationary
And it suspected to us
That may have been a person
overboard from a yacht.