Boats still lost at sea
BOATS caught up in Cyclone Debbie are still missing a month after the category 4 system devastated the Whitsundays.
Townsville Water Police’s Sergeant Matthew Pegg said the Whitsunday Water Police had told them there were still a handful of vessels unaccounted for despite extensive search and salvage efforts.
“There’s some sailing vessels outstanding that they can’t find, they’re not in the mangroves,” he said. “They’ve probably severely damaged and sunk.
“There could be vessels drifting around out in the Coral Sea, you wouldn’t know.”
Townsville police officers went to Cyclone Debbie on water police vessel the Brett Irwin, essentially following the storm down the coastline through choppy waters.
“The boat was sort of surfing down waves at 26, 27 knots and you’d sort of get on a bit of a roll and then it would surf again,” he said.
“It was all pretty exciting in day- been light when you could see the waves. It was a little bit scary at night and you didn’t really know how big the waves were.
“That first night we thought the weather would drop out, but it actually got worse through the night.
“We were alongside a wharf in Hamilton Island and it just blew and rained and a constant lightning show.”
Sgt Pegg said that when the boat arrived in the Whitsundays, their first stop was Shute Harbour.
“Just going in there all the navi- gational beacons had been washed away and blown away,” he said.
“You’d sort of look and there’s a wreck there, there’s a wreck there ...
“It’s a little bit scary sort of idling in the big boat, thinking well what’s underneath me that I can’t see that we’re potentially either going to run into or tangle up.
“We couldn’t get alongside a wharf or a jetty in Shute Harbour because there were boats smashed up and submersed next to the jetties there.”
Sgt Pegg said it still wasn’t as bad as the devastation seen after Yasi at Cardwell.
“Cardwell was different because the majority of damaged vessels were concentrated in that marina,” he said. “I’m pretty sure every single vessel was accounted for. They weren’t all intact. There were boats impaled on pylons in Cardwell because the storm surge was quite significant and lifted them up.
“If they had got a big storm surge like that in Airlie on top of the high tide, I think we could have seen a significant amount of damage.”