The young teenage Australia boy performed a herculean feat to save his mother and siblings, all of whom had been pulled out into the open ocean.
Joanne Appelbee and her three children, who were vacationing in Quindalup on the southwest coast of Australia, were spending their last day at the beach when they decided to take a kayak and inflatable paddleboard out on the water. The water “seemed nice and calm” she recounted to 7 News as they ventured out into the bay.
However, the situation began to unravel after her 13-year-old son Austin’s board flipped and he lost a paddle. As Joanne swam out to pull him in the waves began to get bigger. Even so, they felt they “were pretty good” as they could still see the shore.
But then they flipped again, losing a second ore in the process and at the same time their kayak began filling with water. Despite emptying it, the craft continued to take on water as the waves got stronger and they were being dragged out to sea.
At that point, Joanne had to make “one of the hardest decisions” she had ever made. She asked her son Austin to go back to shore to get help telling him that “this could really serious, really quick.”
“The waves are massive, and I have no life jacket on”
Initially, Austin tried to paddle the kayak to shore using his arms, but it kept taking on more water and he couldn’t fight the power of the ocean pulling them further out. He then tied the straps of the kayak onto his life jacket and, despite thinking he had seen something swimming nearby, got into the water to try pulling it while swimming.
That didn’t work either, and he eventually completely detached himself from the kayak and ditched his life jacket too so that he would have less drag in the water in order to make it to shore.
Austin says that while making his way to shore, he focused on what he had to do recounting, “the waves are massive, and I have no life jacket on … I just kept thinking ‘just keep swimming, just keep swimming.’”
“I was trying to get the happiest things in my head,” he shared knowing that he had to avoid thinking of “the bad things that will distract me.”
After about four hours, he managed to cover the roughly 2.5 miles to shore, but he wasn’t done yet. After collapsing for a moment, he sprinted a little over a mile to reach a phone where he dialed the emergency services number.
“I need helicopters, I need planes, I need boats, my family’s out at sea,” he told the police in a “very calm” manner he recalled. A rescue party was mobilized, and the team located his mother and siblings around 8:30 pm.
What had been planned as an hour-long excursion had turned into an 8-hour harrowing ordeal. One that fortunately ended with a happy story.
CRE: https://en.as.com/