‘I don’t feel guilty for living’
DALLAS REEDY never saw the wave that swamped Easy Rider, but he certainly heard it.
‘‘I was sitting on the deck and I heard it, like a wind rushing, like a train,’’ he said.
‘‘It was dark but I heard it coming. I don’t know big it was.’’
Speaking from his room in Southland Hospital a day after he was pulled exhausted from Foveaux Strait, the powerfully built 44-year-old seemed full of energy but said he felt like he’d run a marathon after 16 hours in the sea.
His eyes were red from the petrol that had been in the can that kept him afloat in the frigid waters of Foveaux Strait for half a night and a day, and one hand was grazed from grimly holding on to the can.
Other than that, his appearance gave little hint of his astonishing survival after the tragedy that appears to have taken the lives of the eight other people who were on the 38-foot fishing boat.
A rogue wave ‘‘blew’’ him off the boat and into the water around midnight on Wednesday.
‘‘I thought, ‘I’m gone’. I just flailed my arms out and managed to hold on to a rope,’’ Mr Reedy said.
He managed to clamber up on to the hull of the upturned boat, and ‘‘tucked’’ himself in near the propeller where he was ‘‘battered for two hours by big waves I couldn’t see’’.
As he clung to the upturned boat, he listened for any sign that people might be alive under it, but heard nothing, he said.
He was too frightened to dive under the boat to check, the water was too rough and he doubted he would have been able to climb back on to the hull. Then he heard air escaping from the boat, and knew it was sinking.
With less than a metre of the hull out of the water, he had ‘‘stepped off into the black’’.
He was thinking, ‘‘This is my time’’, when the petrol can that was to help keep him afloat for the next 14 hours popped up out of the water.
He was close to tears as he spoke of his ‘‘mates’’ on the boat, but said he did not feel guilty that he had lived.
‘‘I just didn’t want to go, I just wanted to live so much, I don’t know why I’m still here,’’ he said.
‘‘I don’t feel guilty that I’m alive – I fought for my life, I wanted to live, I just didn’t want to go.’’
He dubbed his petrol can ‘‘Wilson’’. ‘‘I sang 1960s and 70s tunes and I talked to it. I just did everything I could to stay alive.’’
Mr Reedy went to school with Robert Hewitt, who survived at sea off the Kapiti Coast for four days and three nights in 2006.
Toward the end, Mr Reedy was running out of fight, but he was determined to stay alive so he could see his sons’ 16th and 18th birthdays next week.
He said he used everything he learnt in the army in his fight – even how to deal with hypothermia, which he had twice while in the army.
‘‘When hypothermia set in, it got real bad. I tried to swim it off.’’
But it was a close run thing.
‘‘Towards the end ... I didn’t have anything left in me. I was ready to go and I heard the [rescue] boat coming.’’
He was spotted by a rescue boat member. ‘‘If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be here. I couldn’t have lasted another night.’’
Some family members of the missing still held out hope that their loved ones would be found, police said. The bodies of four people had been recovered by 5pm, police said.
The expected survival time in the 13 degree Celsius waters has been put at just four to six hours, odds that Mr Reedy defied.
Mr Reedy was one of three on the deck when the wave hit. The others were in the wheelhouse.
Seventeen lives have been lost in Foveaux Strait since 2006, 14 on muttonbirding expeditions.