Father faces flak over flip
Dad vows to do Coastguard course after jet-ski scare
An Auckland father has pledged to take a Coastguard course after his jet ski overturned with four people on board, including his 4-yearold daughter.
Gerald — who did not want his surname published — was giving his wife, mother and daughter a ride on a new jet ski on Saturday when he came to a stop near Herald Island in Auckland’s estuary waterways.
A wave caught them by surprise and flipped the vessel about 500m from shore.
Unable to push the jet ski the right way up, the family — who were wearing life jackets — clung to the craft as they waited for help to arrive.
Gerald’s father and another older daughter were also left stranded in a dinghy a few hundred metres away, while a young son who had been on the dinghy jumped off and swam to the jet ski to try to help.
A passing yacht came to their rescue about 15 minutes later.
Gerald said his family didn’t feel in danger during the ordeal, apart from his 4-year-old daughter becoming scared and cold. “Just the little one was crying a bit, but everyone else was okay, we were just calmly waiting,” he said.
But Ramon Saxon, who spotted the flipped craft while sailing with friends from Westhaven Marina to The Riverhead pub for dinner, said the family were “shaken up” when he arrived.
“I got to the family probably just in time as the mother, grandmother, and little 4-year-old looked to be in severe shock,” he said.
“When pulling them into the boat you could see the fear pouring out of them and just happy someone had come along when they did, the little girl had swallowed a lot of water.”
Saxon and his friends brought everyone on board their yacht and wrapped them in blankets.
The youngest girl was “pale” and “shivering”, while Gerald’s wife looked “gobsmacked”, he said.
He also helped Gerald right the jet ski, before sailing to the jetty on Herald Island where they met a Coastguard launch sent to help.
Coastguard duty officer Hemi Manaena said a person from the shore first raised the alarm, leading Coastguard to put out a distress call before sending its own boat to help.
The Coastguard team met the family at the jetty, wrapped them in blankets and reassured them, before dropping them off to Greenhithe where they had launched from.
Manaena praised them for all wearing lifejackets.
“This is a brilliant example where, if not for the lifejackets, we may have been dealing with something much more serious,” he said.
However, he encouraged people with little experience on the water to first contact Coastguard because it offered a range of education tools, including skippers’ day courses, that were useful for anyone who planned to use jet skis, kayaks or larger boats.
It was also important to have communication equipment on board. “Had they had a VHF radio, they could have radioed Coastguard.”
As a yachtsman and volunteer lifesaver at Bethells Beach, Saxon said he was passionate about water safety and hoped the incident would serve as a reminder to others about how quickly things can go wrong.
He said he had nothing against Gerald, but thought he “had no clue” to risk his family’s safety by taking them all out on the water at once.
This included having the 4-yearold girl and older woman on the jet ski at once, while leaving other family members in the nearby dinghy when they didn’t know how to operate it. Most of the family looked like they didn’t know how to swim either, he said. “People please, have some common sense, this could have gone horribly wrong,” he said in a Facebook post.
But Gerald said all his family knew how to swim apart from his parents, who were visiting from overseas.
He thanked Saxon and his friends for their rescue and promised he would be back out on the water soon.
But not with his whole family at once and not before he took one of the Coastguard boating education courses, he said.