ALONE IN THE SEA FOR 29 HOURS

“Part of me knows that I’m hallucinating – they’re the souls of drowned sailors – but they look so real”

On his way to the holiday of a lifetime, Brett Archibald fell off a boat in the middle of the Indian Ocean. For a day and a night he drifted, treading water, praying for rescue, and fighting off a series of predators. This is his story

Darkness is falling fast. I’m alone in a vast ocean, struggling to keep my head above the waves. Any hope of rescue is fading. Then I feel a massive wallop against my back, like a punch, slightly above my left kidney. What the hell was that? I swirl around. Then – bam! Whatever it was hits me again in the same place. Suddenly I’m electric with horror: it’s a shark. I know from watching TV documentaries that some sharks bump their prey first to identify it. Through the deepening gloom, I spot it – sleek and silvery, about two metres long and coming straight towards me.

It was meant to be a wonderful holiday: ten old friends going surfing off the beaches of the Mentawai Islands, which have some of the best waves on the planet. Most of us were in our early 50s and had done pretty well in life. We’d left behind our wives, our boardroom meetings and cumbersome mortgages, met up in Padang in West Sumatra and chartered a boat to make the tenhour journey across a perilous stretch of water, more than 100 nautical miles wide, called the Mentawai Strait. It felt like a real adventure, particularly when we sailed straight into a storm.

I awoke abruptly at 1.30am to the pounding of the boat as it crashed into massive swells. And then the retching began, helped along by a dodgy pizza I’d had for dinner. Finally, at 2.15am, I stumbled out to the upper deck to get some air. After spewing over the side, I remember feeling dizzy as I looked down at the white water churning beneath me. My last conscious thought was: if I’m sick like that again, I’m going to pass out. The next thing I knew, I was somersaulting, tumbling, as if I were in a washing machine. My head filled with a roaring sound. Walls of water rose from the surrounding darkness to swamp my face, flood my nose and wash down my throat. I coughed violently and opened my eyes. I was in the ocean. The wind was howling. Perhaps 30 metres ahead, our boat, the Naga Laut, was moving slowly away. I could hear the boat’s diesel engine grinding against the roar of the wind. “Hey!” I screamed. “Hey! Hey! Hey!” But the sound was stolen away by the waves, wind and rain. No one had seen me fall.

2.30am, Wednesday 17 April 2013

You should be feeling fear, Brett. Panic. But I don’t feel anything. Am I in shock? Suddenly, I’m laughing uncontrollably, hysterically, at the hopeless absurdity of my situation.

3.30am, second hour

The water is warm, like a tepid bath. In the distance, lightning lights up the horizon like a disco strobe. As a surfer, I’ve learnt to read the geometry of a wave – so when a monster reaches me, I take a deep breath and swim through it. I calculate that I’m

between 30 and 40 nautical miles from Padang – about a third of the way to the islands. Too far into open sea for fishing boats. Suddenly I’m overcome with guilt. I should have spent more time with my kids – nine-year-old Zara, and Jamie, aged six – before I said goodbye. And I’d promised to phone my wife, Anita, just before the crossing. Why didn’t I call?

4.30am, third hour Time crawls by. Is drowning painful? Will there be a white light? Will someone, or something, come to take me? I don’t want to be alone. I picture the guys on the boat. In a worst-case scenario, they’ll get to port, discover I’m missing, turn the boat around and sail back. Fourteen hours at a pinch. Hang on, Brett. The boys will be back.

8.30am, seventh hour

The wind blows incessantly, roaring like a cheering stadium crowd heard from a distance. Every minute or so, I have to inhale and swim through a wave’s looming curl. I can feel my tongue swelling in my mouth.

11.30am, tenth hour

My skin has started to wrinkle like crêpe paper. My wedding ring looks lost in folds of decaying flesh. “Dead man’s hands,” I say aloud.

2.30pm, 13th hour

My eyes are swelling up, slowly closing. My legs have gone numb. I’m freezing cold. Through the slit in my eyelids, I watch an enormous black cloud approach. Then I see it. About 300 metres away, through a shroud of rain: my deliverance. A boat. Unmistakable. It’s our boat. It’s the Naga Laut!

3.30pm, 14th hour

As the boat gets closer, I can even read its name. The boys have come back! We’ll be drinking beers tonight and surfing tomorrow. I’m high-fiving and backslapping each of the guys in my mind. Emotion is tightening my throat. Abruptly, the boat stops about 200 metres away. I start hollering: “I’m here! Here, guys!” A minute later, the boat turns broadside. “No, God, no. No, no, no!” I swim like a crazed man towards the Naga Laut, but I’m trapped in a current and making no headway. I put my head down and give it everything I have. Each time I come up for air, I shout, wave, splash water in the air. Please, God, they must see me. And then they power up. They start to move. Slowly they turn left and start sailing away.

5.30pm, 16th hour

A sharp pain shoots through the top of my right arm, followed by hundreds of needle-like stings. I look down to see that I’m surrounded by tiny Portuguese men-of-war. They’re transparent,

with small blue centres, and their tentacles float like liquid cobwebs. They congregate around my neck, stinging my shoulders, upper back and chest. “No!” I start thrashing about to disperse them. But just as I think I’m going to be stung to death, they’ve gone as quickly as they arrived.

6.30pm, 17th hour

A feathery feeling crosses my back, my arms and around my legs. Light, delicate, even pleasurable. I’m being tickled. Hundreds of little silver fish, each a couple of inches long, are nibbling at my body. A sharp pain erupts. I glance down and see a shoal of what look like mini sardines making a frenzied attack on the back of my legs. Jesus Christ! They’re eating me! I let out a scream and kick maniacally. They dart away, but as soon as I stop moving, they return. This goes on for a while until they lose interest.

7.30pm, 18th hour

My arms feel like grandfather-clock weights hanging off my torso. I no longer have the energy to swim. That’s when the shark attacks, walloping into my back. I recognise the black edgings of its vertical fin – it’s a blacktip reef shark, the type that keep close to reefs. I must be near land! An idea forms. “You can take this guy,” I tell myself. “As he opens his mouth, ram your left arm down his throat. When he slows down, throw your right arm over his tail and hang on. He can take you into shore.” I may lose an arm, but at least I’ll be towed to land. Out of this watery wasteland. “C’mon, buddy,” I shout as the shark comes at me. “C’mon!” But the next moment, it cruises past. “Where are you?” I yell furiously. Instead of relief, I feel crushing disappointment.

8.30pm, 19th hour

Wham! Something hits me on the back of my head. I feel a rush of air over my face, then hear an odd rustling in the gathering darkness. Something is moving fast above me. Eventually, I make out the silhouette of a seagull. It’s circling above in the dying light. Again, it swoops and misses my head by millimetres. “Hey,” I shout. “What the f*** are you doing?” It returns to dive-bomb me a third time. Then it dawns on me: the gull is trying to pluck out my eyes, or rip off my ears. I hatch a plan: I’ll coax it to land on my head. Reach up and snatch it. Break its neck, bite off its head and squirt blood down my parched throat. Then my face explodes. Distracted, I haven’t seen a second – larger – bird. He’s hit the bridge of my nose; it feels as if it’s been sliced off my face. He’d been going for my eyes, but I’d turned my head at the last second. Blood pours from my nose and fills my mouth. I scream at the birds. They shriek back. But I’m thinking: seagulls don’t sleep at sea… I have to be close to land. Suddenly, they’re gone, two dark shapes disappearing into the mysterious night.

10.30pm, 21st hour

A canoe. I see the prow clear in the darkness. Two Indonesian boys are sitting in it. Both about six. They’re the children who sell trinkets to moored charter boats. Elated, I shout to them. The one at the back is beautiful. The kid in front has a misshapen face, spiky hair and teeth that stick out. “You’ve saved me,” I shout. “Thank you, boys!” I focus on the one in front. “I’m going to take you to the best dentist. We’ll get those teeth fixed!” They’re smiling at me, but don’t say a word. As I go to grab the prow, my hand passes through air. Canoe and boys have vanished. Down, down I sink. Those boys were a trick of the mind. Or perhaps ocean ghosts who’ve come for a drowning man. I’m in an eerie place. Far from the living and close to the dead.

12.30am, 23rd hour

I try to keep my face out of the water. My nose keeps filling and

3.30am, 26th hour 4.30am, 27th hour

my throat closes in. I hear myself fighting for breath. My body is failing me. I can’t feel anything from my chest down. Exhaustion has won. I can’t keep my eyes open or my neck straight. I feel my head plop into the water. I think I fall asleep.

The sound fills my head before I see it: creaking beams of teak, ropes stretching and twisting as the wind fills a mainsail. There’s a 1634 Dutch East India Company sailing ship 20 metres away. I know, because I made a model of one as a kid. Sailors walk across the deck towards the side: raggle-taggle men, long-haired and bearded, with rotten teeth. “Come on, lad, you can make it.” Two of them throw a rope over the side and a wooden stepladder unravels into the water. Slowly, I start swimming for it. Part of me knows I’m hallucinating – they’re the souls of drowned sailors – but they seem so real. As I look up into those weathered faces, I reach to grab the ladder.

Again, nothing there. My head lolls in the water, my face submerged. For an aeon, I don’t have the energy to lift it. I can feel chunks of my tongue coming off in my mouth. My lips are splitting into fleshy canyons. My fingers are enormous, puffy and white in the moonlight. I feel amphibian. Perhaps my body is liquefying? I’m not even dead yet and the ocean is taking me back.

Air. I need to breathe. Black water. It’s everywhere. Am I going up or down? I need air, but I can’t find it. It takes forever to surface. I’m navigating the zone between life and death. Broken shapes form in front of me, but before I can identify them, they’re gone. The water feels like liquid cement, squeezing the life out of me. Again, I sink slowly.

Drowning will be a release. I take a deep breath and fill my lungs with salt water. I do it three times – it’s not painful. But an agonising pain is burning my tongue. The salt is cauterising the open wounds. I try breathing in water a fourth time, but the pain around my tongue is intolerable. Black spots dance before my eyes. I kick up through the water and burst onto the surface like a champagne cork. Then I see, floating above the water, a black cross. “Take that cross and shove it,” I scream. “I’m done. Just done!”

6.45-7.15am, 29 hours in the water

It’s still there. The black cross. Is it the angel of death? My heart is hammering as the cross gets bigger. But it’s not a crucifix; it’s the mast top and spreader of a yacht – I can see its rigging. After a few minutes, the boat turns away – slightly to starboard. “NO, NO, NO!” I scream. I put my head down and swim. Please be there. Please see me. I emerge 100m away and propel myself out of the water as high as I can. Someone throws a life ring and bodies dive over the side. But my last effort has finished me. I start sinking. Then an arm comes up beneath my ribs and moves across my chest. And I hear a man say: “We’ve got you, mate. We’ve got you.”

Archibald had drifted approximately 50 nautical miles in the open water of the Mentawai Strait. He was found by a tourist charter boat, a long way out from the coast of the island of Sipura. Australian surfer Dave Carbon, a trained lifesaver, reached him just as he was sinking under the water.

A longer version of this article first appeared in the Daily Mail. © Brett Archibald 2016. Extracted from Alone: Lost Overboard in the Indian Ocean by Brett Archibald (Robinson £13.99).