‘I don’t know how much longer I can hang on’
Len Dillon desperately clung to the back of his boat in a freezing, strong current. “I don’t know how much longer I can hang on,” he told wife Heather. The recently retired veteran ambulance officer had an idea of his chances of survival.
And at that moment, it looked as if the 79-year-old might soon be swept to his death in the Hauraki Gulf’s Tiritiri Channel.
The Te Kauwhata couple are known for helping with emergencies around the gulf.
They rescued four people from a sunken yacht several years ago and recently went to the aid of an injured woman on Kawau Island.
One recent Sunday, on May 28, their own crisis unfolded.
While Heather was making a cup of tea in the galley of their Bridgedecker boat, Len was hauling up two fish when he tripped.
“I got one up and I turned around to get the other one . . . next minute
I was on my way into the water,” said Len, who was yesterday reunited with the volunteer Coast Guard members who saved his life.
Grabbing on to the duckboard was all that stopped the strong current taking him away.
“I tried twice to get myself out of the water, but couldn’t, and knew if I tried any more, all I was going to do was probably activate a crook heart and get myself all stressed.
“I said to Heather, I could survive like this, probably another quarter of an hour, then I’d be getting pretty worried.”
The cold of the water — about 10C — was beginning to chill his body, already strained from clinging to his boat. Weighed down with boots and heavy jeans, letting go would have meant quickly sinking to the bottom, if the tide didn’t take him.
Everything seemed to fail at the worst possible time, Heather said.
The ladder he could have climbed on to seized up and couldn’t be pulled down. The radio was malfunctioning and couldn’t make calls out.
Most other boats on the water that afternoon had returned to land, save for one that Heather hopelessly tried to signal by waving her arms.
Then she remembered her cellphone. “I really didn’t think it would work, but I had my little address book and found the numbers for Coast Guard and star-500 ... I think my fingers were starting to get a little bit shaky at that stage.” She found a signal. Back at Gulf Harbour, Coast Guard skipper Lee Armstrong and crew Tony Winyard, Marcus French, Trevor Moore and Rachel Segar were training when the call came in.
They headed out and about 10 minutes later, at the northern end of the Whangaparaoa passage, they sighted a man clinging to a boat.
It took four rescuers to haul him out of the water. “We could obviously see that he was cold and pretty exhausted,” Winyard said.
“If it had been another minute or two, it would have been a completely different story.”
The couple were quick to make improvements to their boat — Len joked he’d been given a “stern talking to” by his daughter — and said they remain indebted to the Coast Guard.