Title: The Wahine Disaster

Author: Max Lambert

Publication details: Reed Publishing (NZ) Ltd, 1970

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Part of: New Zealand Texts Collection

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The Wahine Disaster

Chapter Twelve

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Chapter Twelve

Eastbourne township, with a population of 2,850 sprawls along a thin ribbon of land between the sea and the steep hills on the eastern side of Wellington Harbour. It's a small, friendly, pleasant place. But at its southern end the pleasant character of the borough changes abruptly: just beyond the houses the sealed road ends in a car park area as the hills plunge almost to the edge of the sea. Beyond is a narrow dirt road twisting four miles to Pencarrow Plead. Private vehicles are prevented from using the road by a gate spanning the narrow gap between hills and the rock-strewn beach. From here, Burdan's Gate as it is known, the road bends around a small point, then sweeps in a gentle curve two hundred yards to another gate, stout and padlocked. Just before this gate a narrow track angles off up the hills to Gollans Valley.

The coastline from here to Pencarrow is raw and bleak. In a few places the roadside is lined by a scraggy native shrub giving an illusion of shelter, but for the most part the road, almost at sea level, is completely exposed. The shoreline runs southwest, offering little shelter. The bays are open and shallow. Camp Bay, Hinds Point and Inconstant Point are the only named features.

The beaches are rough, broken and pebbly; the pebbles rattle in and out with the waves. Great outcrops of rock show above the water close to shore. Others lie in jumbled patterns just beneath the surface. The water is shallow and easily disturbed. Beds of kelp swirl about in the tide. In calm seas there are few safe landing places. In rough weather there are fewer still.

On 10 April the Pencarrow shore was lashed by terrible seas and winds with the surf breaking in torment several hundred yards out. Giant waves burst through the inshore rocks, spraying water, boulders and debris over the road. This was the grim shore awaiting many of the Wahine's passengers and crew—and some of the rescuers—on the afternoon of 10 April.

The cold sea shocked the breath out of fifty-four-year-old Miss Margaret Millar of Gore as she surfaced close to the ship. She was poorly dressed for immersion in the sea—no shoes or stockings and only a light linen frock and mohair cardigan. The cardigan helped page 153a little. The strongly ebbing tide carried her rapidly past the stern of the Wahine and soon all she could see was the high port side, and nothing of the boats being lowered or the people jumping in. She kept glancing over her shoulder to see if the ship had gone under.

"I had no idea of the direction of the nearest land. It was raining and blowing. Pretty soon my face got cold. But I was in, and all I could do was lie there. There were many others around." Miss Millar floated quietly, conserving her strength. She couldn't see very much as she rode up and down in the big swells but does recall seeing the Aramoana looking helpless among the lifejacketed people floating in the sea. After she had been in the water for about half an hour her hopes of rescue lifted when she saw a lifeboat making toward her, but it turned away apparently to pick up someone else. A short time later Miss Millar saw the boat stand on end, spilling its occupants into the angry sea. Later, she saw its shattered remains washed up on the far shore. No other boats came near her.

"I realised that no one in this world could help me and that if I was to be saved it would only be by the love and mercy of Almighty God. So I just lay there, unable to help myself."

Though they couldn't help, for they were in the same predicament, others from the Wahine still floated in the water near Miss Millar. "I did think it would be nice to drift alongside someone. An elderly gentleman bumped into me and we did a swirl together. I said to him, 'This is no good' and he replied 'No.' Words seemed so silly at a time like that when looking at someone said more than words." A woman also bumped into Miss Millar, but this time there were no words: the woman was dead. Pier body floated away and so did the elderly gentleman and Miss Millar was alone again. "The waves were beginning to make me feel sick and my back was beginning to get tired because my heaviest part, my bottom, kept wanting to sink. My feet were right out of the water so I thought I'd put them down and straighten up. But the thought of sharks flashed through my mind so I let my feet fly up again and just put up with my tired back."

She was very cold now. And tired. She shivered from head to foot and her legs were numb. She thought it would be nice to sleep and lay back and closed her eyes. She was thinking how wonderful page 154sleep was when water suddenly gushed up her nose and shocked her out of the deadening stupor.

She looked about again after the reviving wave and realised she could see land. But as the bleak Pencarrow coast loomed up Miss Millar saw something else. Rocks. She floated in, powerless to avoid them.

"On my right was a huge rock as high as a house with mountainous seas breaking over it. The awful rocks worried me, but in spite of them the sight of land gave me hope." A few minutes later she was close to shore and in the grip of breaking waves spilling tons of cold green water in a fury of foam. One wave tossed her around in its giant grip, twisting her backwards.

She cried to herself, "Oh, my back" and wondered if she could hold her breath until the wave threw her to the surface again. She did, but another sea was coming at her. It was not quite as bad as the first but buried her again. She did her best to cover her head with her arms, thinking a broken arm was better than a head slashed open on the rocks. When Miss Millar came out of the second wave she was, unbelievably, beyond all visible rocks and the beach—such as it was—was close. She saw two young men bolting across it to pull a man out of the water who was closer in.

Somehow she dragged an arm out of the water and waved weakly to one of the men. One of the greatest thrills of her life was to see the man wave back. He came running toward her as she was washed in.

Her ordeal wasn't yet quite over. "There was a strong undertow, and my feet would hit the bottom and the rubble would run from under them and I'd be on my way out again. But the young man rushed in when one wave went out and waited until the next brought me into his most wonderful arms." The rescuer dragged Miss Millar out of the shallow, ebbing water and held her gently as he lowered her to her feet. They stood there for a few minutes, this middle-aged woman and her young rescuer. Miss Millar murmured thanks to the man and thanked God for saving her life.

The first thing Dianne Houltham was aware of when she hit the water was other people around her calling for their children, wives, husbands and friends. Dianne was alone and had no one to call to. As it had done with Miss Millar and all the others in the water, the tide dragged Dianne away from the ship and she began the long drift to the Pencarrow coast. She linked up with four others, page 155and the five of them clung to each other's clothes and lifejackets like limpets. One of the little group was Christopher Morrah, twenty-one, an assistant purser on the Wahine.

"We seemed to be out there for hours," Dianne remembers, "trying to encourage each other to relax and keep kicking, watching other objects we knew were people, bobbing about helplessly among the waves, and the crowded liferafts drifting further away from us." Dianne and her group also saw the motorboat's passengers tossed into the sea and they agreed then they were safer in their life-jackets in the water than in an overcrowded boat.

The little group drifted calmly for a long time until they hit the waves which were breaking off the eastern shore. As the breakers became more frequent and rougher, they began to fragment the party. The sea peeled three of the five away, leaving Dianne and Morrah together. They clung to each other until an unexpected breaker forced them apart. Suddenly Dianne hit something hard. She remembered nothing more until she came to, shivering, on a cold, rocky, deserted beach. Her back, arms and legs were bruised and her face was grazed. She was alone. There was no sign of Morrah. It was not until next day that she learned that Morrah was dead.

Many swimmers were chilled by the sea but some found it warm, which was not surprising because the sea temperature, at 58°, was 13° higher than the air reading. When policeman David McEwen plunged into the sea from the W&liine's port side belting he was surprised how remarkably warm the water was. When he dragged himself from the surf just north of Hinds Point between one and a half and two hours later he was still reasonably warm. But as he stood, completely exhausted after a battle for survival in the final few yards, the cold wind almost froze him on the spot.

Someone kicked the top of Graham Poole's head as he climbed down one of the Wahine's port side ladders and shouted "Keep going". Poole, thirty-five, didn't need any urging. He was going as fast as he dared. When he got to the end of the ladder just above the belting he paused for a second or two and then made a fiat dive to the water about ten feet below.

Swimming in the bulky lifejacket wasn't easy and when he tired, and stopped to look back, he found he had got only forty yards from the ship. Another swimmer passed Poole and told him to page 156kick, so the Auckland man began a rhythmic breaststroke to get as far away from the ship as possible in case she went down.

The current swept Poole around her stern into a sea seemingly full of people. He had no control over the direction he went and had no idea where he was. The rescue boats he could see were a long way off so he decided to attempt to get to one of the rafts floating nearby. He swam towards one but it was hard work and he didn't seem to make much headway. Another headed his way but he missed it as he tried to swim against the current to get in its path. A few minutes later he saw it capsize.

Then a curling wave lifted him and dumped him fairly close to the first raft he had been chasing. "It took a long time to make the last twenty yards. When I finally reached it someone pulled me up on the already full raft and I sprawled on the edge exhausted. It was then I began to feel the cold and the water I had swallowed burned deep."

The raft floated on. Some time later a big wave loomed over the little craft. As Poole watched it begin to break he reached out and grabbed a rope running around the side of the raft. Pie hung on desperately as the wave smashed down, overturning the raft and sweeping everyone else thirty to forty yards away. Poole tried lifting himself up on the raft but didn't have the strength to succeed. As he held on in the water he got colder and colder, his teeth chattered like a pneumatic drill, his body becoming stiff and numb.

From then on events became rather muddled. Poole remembers seeing a rubber dinghy with an outboard motor (Vic Cranston's Zodiac) rescuing other people from the now rough and breaking sea. He swallowed some petrol which must have come from the outboard. That also burned his throat and stomach. He dimly recalls someone asking people to make room on the raft for a woman in the water and someone else shouting "Hang on, the raft's going ashore."

Then a breaker picked up the raft and tore from his hands the rope he had been hanging on to. Poole was in the boiling surf and hitting something hard. When he opened his eyes he was on a rock. Another wave washed him clear and threw him up on a rocky, shingly beach.

The people on the Wahine's motorboat had had it somewhat easier until they were tipped into the sea. The lucky ones were picked up by the Tapuhi and pilot launch Arahina. The less for- page 157tunate missed out on rescue and the heavy seas carried them and their overturned boat on to the eastern shore.

Albert Hansen remembers that when the Arahina had to leave the lifeboat because it was in dangerously shallow and breaking water, a woman, two other men and himself were left clinging to the boat. He looked around, saw large black rocks with waves breaking over them and began to take stock. He remembers thinking that he had had a good life and that he would soon be fifty-eight. Pie asked himself if he was prepared to settle for that. Later he heard of another man from the Wahine who had seen angels at about that time. Hansen saw no angels—all he could see was rocks. He let go of the boat as it surged in toward shore and went with the waves, head first, floating on his back, legs dangling uselessly. The waves picked him up and dumped him ashore. He isn't too clear what happened after that but remembers a dark-featured policeman leaning over him and asking him if he could get up. The injured man said he couldn't, because his back was gone. The policeman disappeared to get help. Hansen, his teeth chattering, lay where he was flat on his back as unconsciousness overwhelmed his senses.

The seventh time Max Nelson and his wife were washed off the motorboat was the last. They were separated as they were dashed into the rocky coast by the surf. Nelson got to his feet on the rocks on which he landed, tried to climb them, but was washed off again to one side. Eventually he felt ground under his feet and sloshed, ashore, dazed. Someone helped him to the road and there he found his wife, another rescuer aiding her.

Canterbury University student Roger Bush stayed with the lifeboat until it was close to shore. Then he was swept off. Completely exhausted, he was unable to help himself as the waves carried him in. A policeman dragged him to safety.

Another passenger who came ashore from the motorboat was Mrs Hickman of Ashburton. "I floated. My lifejacket kept coming off over my head and I kept pushing it back and the next thing I saw were some rocks. I made a grab at one, but I got washed off. Then I felt a bang, which did not hurt, but I seemed to get into this terrible whirlpool with sea all over the top. It was really terrific and my lifejacket got torn off and the last thing I remember is I seemed to be in a big vacuum with all this water around me and my feet touched, it felt like ... it was not sand ... it was page 158shingle or gravel, and that is the last I remember till I came to up on the bank."

She had lost sight of her husband when the boat overturned; later, she learned that he was among the dead.

The sea scored a victory over the Wahine's motorboat and it also claimed the Aramoana's two motor lifeboats.

When the ferry's skipper, Captain Anthony Dodds, realised there was no chance of getting survivors aboard his ship the decision was made to launch the two motorboats. Captain Dodds backed the ferry into calmer water and the boats and their volunteer crews under first officer Charles Graham and second officer John King were lowered safely to the sea. Both lifeboats headed for the survivors who could be seen in the water towards the eastern shore. Captain Dodds and the others who remained on the Aramoana lost sight of both boats in the breakers.

Before he volunteered for Graham's boat chief cook Arthur Elliott, an ex-Royal Navy man, had been warming pies and making soup for possible survivors. All that was forgotten now as he and the six others in the boat went about the task of saving lives.

"We ignored the rafts and took off after the individual people floating in the water in their lifejackets," Elliott says. "We passed a surfboat and a fishing boat on our way toward them, and it was about ten minutes before we got up with the people swimming or floating."

Aramoana motorman Eddie Smith grabbed the lifeboat's painter and went into the water for the first survivors they reached—an old man and boy of about six years of age who were clinging to one of the Wahine's three wooden rafts. Elliott remembers: "The old man was half unconscious. Eddie swam about six feet taking the painter to the raft. We dragged the rope back and pulled the man and the boy and Smith aboard. I wedged the boy between the engine and a seat. He was squealing out in fright." The old man, badly shocked, had a cut over his brow and was bleeding. With his clothes and lifejacket heavy with water it was a big job to get him in, but four of the Aramoana crew finally got the old chap in by grabbing his trousers.

Now the Aramoana's boat plucked two women from the sea, one of them Mrs Karalyn Brittain.

She had got the surprise of her life when she went right under after jumping from the Wahine. She came up spluttering and page 159coughing. She looked for the seaman who had Joanne and saw him on his back with her daughter kneeling on the front of his lifejacket, which was floating fiat on the surface. She could just see Joanne's coat and hat. The seaman called out and told her to get as far away from the ship as she could. She could not swim but paddled with her hands. She tried to keep near the seaman and Joanne but gradually they drifted further away and finally disappeared.

As Mrs Brittain drifted she could see houses on Seatoun Heights at times through the murk, and to sea the Aramoana. Slowly she moved towards the opposite shore. At one stage she came across a young steward holding hands with a girl and joined them. "We held hands and I tried to keep them calm by telling them how close to shore we were; anything but the position we were in. I prayed and I told them to pray." The girl started calling for help. A man popped up nearby and asked incongruously, "What's wrong?" He took the girl's hand and they drifted away, the man comforting her.

The sea separated Mrs Brittain and the steward. Mrs Brittain drifted into bigger seas "deep green with a bit of a flip at the top". Then she remembered the whistle attached to the lifejacket. She blew and blew and blew.

Unexpectedly, she spotted Graham's boat. She remembers it as "a little boat with a man standing up and peering around". Excitedly she waved and yelled. Next minute it was beside her and then she was lying in the boat and being told to hang on to oars which were beside her. The old man who had been dragged in a few minutes earlier was in the bottom too. Mrs Brittain lay where she was and took no further notice of what was going on. She felt safe and no longer had to think about survival although she was desperately worried about her baby daughter.

Though Mrs Brittain felt safe, the boat's crew did not. They were fighting for the life of the little craft. Graham had taken the boat closer to shore to get more survivors and was hauling two aboard when a big sea broke over the boat, partially swamping it. The tiller, which did not have a pin locking it to the rudder, was washed overboard. Graham grabbed a steering oar and managed to turn the boat and run with the sea, but he was unable to steer away from the shore. He tried making an emergency tiller from the floorboards but the wood was too soft, and before he could do page 160anything else the boat was in shallow water and swamped by huge waves.

One of them jerked Elliott, motorman Smith and steward Geoff Mortensen from the boat. The rolling green comber ripped Elliott's shoes from his feet and washed his jacket off. The jacket was one of the Salvus type and Elliott had never felt confident about it. He was less so after seeing how easily it slipped over his head. He managed to grab the jacket's tapes and held on to them as he shrugged out of his raincoat and let the waves wash him in. He worried about the rocks as he neared the shore and one wave stranded him on an outcrop four or five feet out of the water. He clung to the rock as the wave surged out, but let go and went into the beach on the next breaker. As he staggered to his feet he saw Mortensen lying dazed at the water's edge with a cut on his head. The Aramoana's cook braced a foot against a small rock and hung on to Mortensen to prevent the undertow taking him out again. He pulled Mortensen clear as the wave receded and the two men limped up the beach. Smith had come ashore safely too.

The other crewmen and the survivors, huddled in the bottom, were in the boat as it crashed ashore, the rocks grinding chunks of fibreglass from its hull.

Mrs Alma Hick had been in the water over an hour and was well over to the Pencarrow coast when she was picked up by John King's Aramoana boat. She had been helped over the side of the Wahine after seeing Gordon taken into the water by second steward McMaster. Mrs Hick was the first survivor rescued by King and his five-man crew. An elderly Australian man was hauled out of the sea a few minutes later but these were all that the motorboat was to rescue, and they weren't out of the water long before they were back in. King's boat had lost its tiller soon after launching— again no locking-pin—but the steering oar worked reasonably in its place although making steering heavy work. An engineer in the boat manufactured a tiller from the floorboards, as Graham had tried to do, but this broke and King went back to the steering oar.

The sailors from the Aramoana had just rescued Mrs Hick and the Australian when a giant wave flipped the boat end over end, capsizing it. A couple of the crew were washed away to land on shore. Another was picked up by a private launch. King looped his arm through the neck tape of Mrs Hick's lifejacket and clung with her to the upturned boat with the two remaining crewmen. The page 161Australian floated nearby. Their predicament was shortlived: the 54-foot trawler Seaway found King's boat soon after it had capsized.

The high-bowed little Seaway had come into Wellington the night before after a rough trip from fishing grounds off Akaroa. Norman O'Connor, a crewman, was having a quiet beer in the Pier Hotel early in the afternoon of 10 April when someone dashed in to shout that the Wahine was being abandoned and the harbourmaster wanted every available boat to go to the rescue. O'Connor was prepared to take the Seaway out himself even though he didn't have the necessary qualifications but the situation resolved itself when Digby Foggin, skipper of the trawler Newfish I, which had already left for the Wahine without him, leapt aboard the Seaway and took the wheel. Two volunteers, one of them Terry Adams, at that time the Seamen's Union assistant secretary, joined as the ship cast off.

As the Seaway closed with the lifeboat the trawler crew heaved out a line which the Aramoana sailors managed to fasten to the boat's grab-rail. It broke, but was followed by another with a lifebelt attached. One by one the four were hauled from the boat and aboard the Seaway, Mrs Hick first. Another lifebelt saved the life of the Australian.

Nearby the Newfish was busy plucking other people from the water as the Seaway headed back for town. The rescued five huddled in the vessel's tiny chartroom, blue with cold and suffering from exposure. Behind, the Aramoana's boat drifted sluggishly in to shore. The sea finally tossed her, upside down, on the sharp rocks near Hinds Point, a total loss.

Of the four lifeboats—two from the Wahine and two from the Aramoana—cast ashore on the eastern side of the harbour, the Wahine's number three was the only one to arrive undamaged and the only one whose skipper had chosen the east as his goal.

Number three's safe, easy landing well north of the deadly rocks was due to Able Seaman Terry Victory's determination to keep the sea astern and not to make for Seatoun as he was urged to do by some of his passengers. Victory's lifeboat scooted up harbour and surfed ashore on a long swathe of sand off the heart of Eastbourne township, three and a half miles northeast of the Wahine, at about 2.45 pm.

Victory, one of the certificated lifeboatmen on the Wahine, took charge of the craft because there was no one else to do so. Two page 162firemen from the ship were among other crewmen aboard. During the abandonment Victory got down to the aft starboard side of C deck to see passengers jumping into number three as it drifted alongside the ship after launching. He leapt about eight feet into the boat, climbed on the gunwale and tried to hold the boat against the ship and help people aboard. Then someone jumped on him and he fell back into the boat. When he got to his feet it had drifted aft of the Wahine's stern doors. He shipped the tiller as the passengers got to work cranking the propulsion gear. The boat was nowhere near full. Victory said later that he estimated forty to forty-five persons were aboard but there were probably more than that. George Reid, who boarded the boat from B deck, did a check after landing and thinks the boat carried between fifty and sixty.

One man was hauled in from the sea but there seemed to be no other swimmers in the immediate vicinity as number three moved away from the Wahine. She backed out into the channel with the sea abeam and then Victory turned the bow to the north. There was a chorus of advice to take the boat where Dartford's and Bennett's craft appeared headed, but Reid remembers that Victory was adamant: "We're not going to go across the sea and get tipped over. We're going to run before the wind and the sea," he said. The wind was from the northerly quarter and against them before they got ashore but they moved steadily away from the Wahine, and the passengers moved the boat well once they got accustomed to the propulsion gear. One of the pilot launches appeared to change direction toward number three when it was about a quarter of a mile from the Wahine, but was apparently satisfied at the boat's progress and steered past to go after liferafts. The pilot's crew waved thumbs up to the lifeboat's complement. Reid helped propel the boat for about twenty minutes until someone suggested he might have a heart attack and a younger man took his place.

The boat's arrival at Eastbourne took almost everyone by surprise. A few people spotted the craft as it sailed majestically through the rain and mist past the southern end of Eastbourne township. It was largely housewives and children from homes on the water's edge who gaped as the big white three-tonner came in on the waves that were breaking three to four hundred yards out. "I didn't like the look of it at first," says Reid. "It was tremendous. High and wild. But after we weathered the first wave I quite page 163enjoyed it. I'd never surfed before." The lifeboat ground deep into the sand as it touched the beach.

Fate decreed the rocky, more southerly landing for the rafts and people in the water. Ironically, had the wind remained strong from the south, and had the tide not been running out, survivors would have been swept up harbour to safe landings in Eastbourne township and probably beyond. Hundreds of rescuers would have been on hand. But in the hour after 1 pm the wind dropped rapidly. By 2 pm it was down to a shade over ten knots. More important though the wind veered a full ninety degrees from southwest to northwest. And the outgoing tide was swirling strongly east and south when the abandonment was fully under way. Mocking the rescue operation, the wind and current drove the rafts and swimmers more directly across the harbour on to the killing rocks, a mile away.

When the raft that Lynn and Gillian Kingsbury leapt on to finally drifted away from the sinking Wahine, about twenty people were aboard. The canopy had not inflated and lay squashed underfoot. Attempts made to get it up failed because everyone couldn't get out to the edge of the raft at once. Those on board also tried unsuccessfully to manoeuvre with the aid of paddles to get at swimming survivors. Lynn realised their plight was serious, that some of those who had left the ship would perish and that he could well be one. He thought about how he would reorganise his life if Gillian did not live. His wife, unknown to him, was thinking along the same lines and later told Lynn she had decided she would try and manage their farm if he died.

Lynn wasn't sure where the raft was headed. He knew the harbour layout only vaguely and because of the rain, mist and swell it was difficult to see the shore. The raft rode comfortably but the wind and rain were bitingly cold and after a quarter of an hour the exposed passengers were shivering uncontrollably. Those on the raft tried singing, but after Onward Christian Soldiers and Oh, What a Beautiful Morning, interest waned. Empty floating life-jackets and muffled cries for help from the sea depressed everyone. Thirty minutes after they had left the Wahine the rugged Pencarrow coast began to loom up, grey and forbidding. The swell was heavier and moving more quickly with sharper crests when suddenly the Tapuhi was by them. The tug's crewmen threw a line which was fastened to a shackle on the raft's webbing.

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Rescue seemed certain, but hopes were dashed as the tug's bow ploughed alarmingly close. At the worst moment the raft was ten feet from the tug's bow. A crewman hastily cast off the line and those on the raft heard him yell to the bridge, "Full astern and bloody quick!" The Tapuhi narrowly cleared the raft and its frightened passengers. The tug was only a cockleshell when seen from the Wahine, but alongside the raft she seemed immense. There was no time for a second rescue attempt.

The raft was in the breakers now. One tremendous sea lifted the tiny craft, carried it on its crest for several hundred yards and dropped it at the base of a ten-foot rock. Three people lost their grip and were thrown overboard. The next wave, even larger, lifted the raft to the top of the rock. Lynn remembers, "We pivoted and fell down the other side. Most of us were thrown out. The next thing I remember is feeling something solid under me. I grabbed. Between waves it was a rock about four feet out of the water. The rope the tug gave us was hitched around my ankle. It was taut. I tried to free it but hadn't succeeded when the wave hit me. A broken leg seemed inevitable, but somehow the rope came undone."

More waves and he was being rolled over and over in the boiling surf with not a chance of doing a thing to save himself. Moments later he was washed ashore. He was on his hands and knees in a foot of swirling water. Another wave poured over him as he crawled up the beach and staggered to his feet. Behind, the raft was close in, upside down with several people, including Gillian, underneath. She summoned every ounce of willpower to remain calm as she fought to free an arm which she had entwined through the raft's webbing earlier. She won the desperate battle but lost the handbag she had clung to throughout the trip from the ship. She attempted to crawl out from under the raft as it sloshed about on the shingly beach but the waves kept clawing it back to sea. Gillian was in danger of drowning until her husband and other passengers already safe on shore lifted it up and dragged her to her feet.

Mrs Phyllis Robertson of Wellington was another who landed alive on the eastern shore from a raft. She yelled for help as she landed in the water from the stricken Wahine. Five minutes after quitting the ship she was aboard a raft but remembers the people already on it had a job getting her aboard. Her thick coat and page 165suit, waterlogged, made her heavy. "Don't let me go," she implored and they didn't. She lay shivering, soaked and shocked, in the bottom of the raft, on her side. Lying half across Mrs Robertson was another woman, who was vomiting. "I didn't think we had any chance of being saved. But I thought it was better to die out there than on the ship."

The raft floated a long time before a man yelled: "Hold on, everyone. This is it!" The raft was ashore an instant later crashing down on the beach. "It happened so quickly. There was a tremendous volume of noise. The surf was booming all around. We were lucky. The younger passengers were out as quick as a flash and helped us. I'll never forget. Then I was crawling up the beach and it was nice to be on land. But then I looked up and saw those tremendous cliffs.

" 'God! No man's land,' I thought."

Airwoman Pinky Brown's liferaft performed nicely, and the inflated canopy protected the twenty aboard from wind and rain. Pinky was close to one of the two openings and watched the lifeboats disappear into the mist. Then a girl in her late teens was hauled from the water and she was followed by a hefty Maori who Pinky swears was clad only in a pair of swimming trunks. Fie was blue with cold. The raft moved quickly astern of the Wahine and things went well until about ten minutes later when the raft was hit by an unusually big wave. "A damned big one," Pinky recalls. "We saw it coming and closed the flaps, but water forced its way in as the wave smashed down. The raft bent inwards and I fell back on the others. But the raft sprang back to normal shape and we scooped out the water."

Then Pinky spotted another man swimming in the water. Like the Maori, he was without a lifejacket. Pinky moved away from the flap as the men aboard heaved the dripping survivor into the raft after snagging him with a boathook which had come from the Wahine.

Apart from the one big wave the raft was untroubled by the sea and floated well. "Up and down, up and down, up and down," says Pinky. "Many of us were sick, and the stench was unpleasant. It made me feel awful and I opened the flap and vomited into the sea."

A Fijian on the raft was praying out loud. A man Pinky remembers as a "honey" tried to organise a sing-song. One of the page 166few tunes that went the distance was Michael Row the Boat Ashore. The singing ended. Near Pinky a crying woman was telling her husband, "I've loved you through all this and I still love you." "Honey" chipped in: "You'll be telling him a different story in ten years."

The raft closed with the eastern shore, "Honey" gave a running commentary: "Cheer up everyone. We're nearly there. A beautiful landing. A beautiful sandy beach." Pinky looked out. All she could see were rocks. Someone produced a knife and ripped a whopping hole in the canopy so those aboard would have a greater chance of escaping if the raft overturned. Pinky decided the fewer on board the raft if it capsized, the better. She peeked from the raft again and saw the breakers, decided they were reasonably close to shore, and jumped into the sea. As she floated on her back those left on the raft yelled to her "Are you okay?" Pinky waved and shouted back, "I'm right." Then she was in the breakers and swallowing seawater. Suddenly a little Asian boy, about seven or eight, appeared beside her. Pinky didn't know where he had come from. He hadn't been on her raft. Pinky grabbed the boy's lifejacket tapes and the two of them were swirled ashore. They touched bottom and "Honey" was at her side, helping. "Good on you, you little fish," he grinned. Pinky knew then the liferaft was ashore safely. The little boy was taken from her. Pinky was sick again.

The raft that carried Sue Madarasz to the far shore had trouble getting away from the Wahine. It heaved up and down alongside the ship for the best part of quarter of an hour. Sue was worried that the listing ship would go right over and crush the raft and the twenty or so aboard. And the davits which hung over the little craft and the big swinging lifeboat hooks were frighteningly dangerous. The passengers tried paddling with their hands without much success. Finally, the tide pulled them past the stern of the ship.

Sue was scared, and concerned about Peter. The raft's canopy was not up and before long she and the others were soaked by the rain and sea and miserably cold. She kept her head down in a vain attempt to keep warm. Soon she was shaking like a leaf. Alongside her a woman was vomiting into a hat. It was an altogether unpleasant ride across the harbour, which ended when the raft capsized in the surf.

Sue splashed into the water, was tumbled over and over and page 167then popped to the surface. "I tried swimming. It just about killed me. I think the best thing to do is just relax. The waves kept on coming but I seemed to be going out. I didn't know whether to lie on my back and let them go over me, or what. I swam, but I just couldn't make it. I was getting worried then and I think I yelled out to someone on the beach who was waiting for us." In the end she was swept in and the rescuer, who turned out to be a fellow survivor, yanked her from the sea.

When the raft holding salesmanager Roger Wilson plopped into the sea the painter was still attached to the Wahine. Wilson crawled to the small stern opening to release the rope. It seemed to him an age before he got the line free, allowing the raft to float off. Then he discovered the small sea-anchor and put it in to the water. To a certain extent the drogue kept the raft's head into the wind.

As the raft drifted across the harbour, the passengers reasonably warm and comfortable under the bright orange canopy, Wilson saw the Aramoana, the Tapuhi, a pilot boat, and other rescue vessels coming from the north. He also watched the Wahine's motorboat overturn and a nearby raft capsize. For some time he thought one of the rescue boats would get to his raft. "But when we got close to the shore I realised that we would have to beach and all I could see was a shoreline of rocks and breaking surf. My main concern was to help bring the raft in and save the people on it. One poor guy in the water near us kept crying 'Help', but there was nothing we could do to save him."

Now the raft was in the big stuff. Wilson fought desperately to keep the craft's head to the wind and not abeam of the waves, mountainous and breaking off the top.

Wilson: "We took two very big breakers on top of the raft and only just managed to come up again. We got closer and started riding the surf. I used the small paddle to try to steer the raft to a beach I could make out and ripped the rubber canopy with a knife provided in the raft so that if the craft turned over people would not be trapped inside."

The manoeuvring succeeded. The raft thumped down on the beach. Wilson and another man leapt out, holding the raft on to a rock jutting from the sand so the others could get out.

Australian Sue Smith's raft flipped in the surf off the eastern shore and though its canopy was not up people were trapped underneath.

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The majority of the passengers were elderly or old; some of them drowned. For a few minutes Sue was in trouble herself as she struggled to get clear of the floppy rubber. Each time she tried, a wave forced her back. Youthful strength eventually took her to the surface, free at last. She held an old woman up but waves forced the pair apart and the other woman drowned as Sue was washed ashore. Bodies of passengers from the raft, who had not been as lucky as Sue, were rolling back and forward in the waves. The living were too weak to drag the dead and injured from the water.

Robert Landreth of Dunedin spotted a couple of fishing boats as the raft carrying him and his wife Gladys, fifty-nine, neared the far shore. But the boats couldn't get to the raft because of the rocks, and it slipped by into the surf. Then it was overturned by a big wave. Landreth was trapped underneath and could feel himself drowning. Suddenly he was free of the cloying raft, being washed on to a rock—"Good and hard too; I think that's what brought me around"—and then ashore on hands and knees. There were four other people near him at the water's edge. They appeared dead; he tried to lift their heads from the water but was too exhausted. Later, he learned that his wife, too, had drowned.

For five and a half years Alun Williams had trained to save people in the water from crashed or ditched aircraft but had never had to put his skills to the test—until 10 April. That it was to save people from a sinking ship was quite immaterial.

Williams, a burly Welshman who migrated to New Zealand after the last war, should have been rescuing Wahine survivors from one of the two Zodiac liferafts that had reached Seatoun beach from Wellington Airport. The first Zodiac had got away all right but the one Williams was to have gone on was partially swamped by a vicious little wave at the launching spot at the western end of the beach and the motor coughed as water entered the carburettor. Alongside, about to go out, was the 17-foot cabin cruiser Maru. It had been brought to the beach by Peter Webster, a Miramar fireman, who had borrowed it in the emergency from a friend's home. The owner reached the scene to see the Maru disappearing toward the rescue zone. Williams had not waited to get the Zodiac bailed and the motor started. He heaved one of the airport team's ten-man liferafts into the cabin cruiser and climbed in. Senior crash fireman Malcolm Yates, another of the airport page 169men, and Webster joined him and the Maru spurted away from Seatoun.

The Wahine had slipped over on her side by the time the Maru was circling the ship. There was no sign of survivors but Williams could see people in the water further east. He told Webster to sweep toward the Pencarrow coast. Webster steered while Yates worked the carburettor. The throttle linkage wasn't functioning properly so Yates had to lift the engine cover off and pump the carburettor manually. The engine drove a Hamilton jet propulsion unit.

The sea was fairly manageable near the Wahine, but the rough stuff further out was frightening. Battling the bruising waves rolling from the harbour entrance, the Maru, despite her speed, took some time to reach the group of survivors the men on her could see—about twenty-five people scattered over a wide area, exhausted, shocked, grey, and absolutely unmoving. There was hope in their eyes though as they watched the boat manoeuvre. Rescuing them, however, was not so easy—as Webster, Williams and Yates soon found out.

"We'd try and pull alongside someone in the trough of a wave only to find another twenty-footer come thundering down on us," says Webster. We had to leave whoever we were attempting to pick up, open up the throttle and try again. We were close to foundering three or four times and rode over a couple of the large waves side on. Luckily we didn't ship much water. The boat would have been in real trouble if the sea had doused the exposed engine."

At 2.45 pm the jet boat was four to five hundred yards off shore just out of the surfline. To stay there was to court disaster. The men couldn't pick up anyone and there was no option but to head back to Seatoun. But Williams wasn't needed to man the boat and he could not leave people in the water alone, so he heaved the liferaft over the side, pulled the lanyard to inflate the little round craft and, as Webster manoeuvred the Maru as close to it as he dared, dived overboard.

Webster and Yates watched until Williams flipped safely into the liferaft, then turned toward the western shore. They escaped narrowly as a larger than usual wave rolled at them, curling over.

In an account which Williams wrote he said simply of his action after getting into the raft: "I took the lifeline and went back into page 170the water, going round and pulling people into the raft." There was a good deal more to it than that. He swam through the turmoil of the sea to the half-drowned survivors, tugging and pushing them toward the liferaft. Getting the first couple aboard called for a tremendous effort; heaving them from the water up and over the slippery, smooth sides of the raft as it jumped up and down. After that it was a little easier, as the rescued gave a hand at rescuing as best they could in their weakened condition.

Williams swam away repeatedly from the liferaft, lifeline trailing behind, to bring in the seven people he could find in the vicinity. One was dead. The rest of the twenty-five that had been on the scene earlier had floated away. Williams was wearing white overalls that he borrowed during the morning from Air New Zealand personnel at the airport and at no stage did he inflate the thin circle of the service-type lifejacket looped over his head, for it would have made swimming difficult. Finally Williams had six survivors and one dead man aboard his raft. There were probably a couple of women among the little group hunched under the liferaft canopy. Williams is not sure. Sex was not important that day.

The raft spun into the surf and swept toward the rocky shore. Luck was with the people aboard: the raft hit a rock, bounced off, and slapped down on a tiny patch of sand.

Alun Williams and the crews of the Aramoana's lifeboats were not the only rescuers to end up on the eastern shore. The four-man crew of the 33-foot sloop Tahi Miranda were washed ashore battered and bruised near Hinds Point after the yacht was sunk by-huge seas in the harbour entrance. For owner-skipper Gerry Devitt it was the end of a dream and almost the end of his life. His life savings were sunk in this immaculate yacht, which he had been preparing for a world cruise. With fellow yachtsmen Jack Lysaght, Nick Cass, and Ted Colgan aboard he had left the Port Nicholson boat harbour along with the other small boats. Motoring past the deserted Wahine the Tahi Miranda had headed southeast to check that no survivors were drifting out to sea. Nick Cass remembers the conditions as fantastic. He saw Gerald Gibbons' Rewanui surfing past on one of the huge swells sweeping in from the southwest like massive express trains. "It must have carried her almost half a mile. Every moment I thought the bow would dip and she would be finished, but finally she slid off the back of the wave."

The Tahi Miranda drew a blank near the heads and turned page 171back. Further up harbour the yacht's crew spotted survivors close inshore. As Devitt manoeuvred the yacht to get closer, a huge sea thundered over the stern, flooding below deck through the open hatchway. In the rush to get out, the hatch covers had been left behind. Devitt turned the half-swamped yacht into the seas and, bailing and pumping furiously, his crew managed to get rid of most of the water. Once again they turned for the survivors but a giant wave which seemed higher than their 37-foot mast curled over and smashed down on the deck with the power of a waterfall. The Tahi Miranda rolled and screwed as the huge mass of water bore her down. Colgan was washed off and the mast ripped away. In the cabin, Lysaght was spun like a mouse in a cage, breaking his collarbone. The sloop slowly righted herself but was dangerously low in the water. And the motor was swamped. Cass realised it only needed a few more big seas and the boat would be lost. "I stripped off my overcoat, suit jacket and shoes, and grabbed a fender to act as a lifebuoy. I was worried about Gerry who couldn't swim, and Jack with his broken collarbone. We fitted Jack into a lifering and tried to get the water out."

But the water continued to pour in and the Tahi Miranda finally sank.

As the remaining three crew members were swept off, Cass tried to stay with Devitt but waves broke them apart. "They were crashing down and swamping us and I had ta fight to the surface coughing and spewing each time. I thought it was the end," Cass recalled later.

As he came closer to the shore he could see the rocks, waves dashing over them and high into the air. The seas swept Cass alongside Lysaght, and the two men decided to try to swim towards a tiny beach. Finally a wave cast them on the shore. Cass was so exhausted he was unable to get clear before the wave dragged him out. "A smaller wave washed me in again, and on my hands and knees I managed to crawl about ten yards before collapsing. When the wave took me out I saw Jack Lysaght washed out with it. I thought 'That's the end of Jack.' " Luckily it wasn't. Lysaght was swept around the rocks on a point and tossed ashore again, alive.

The next day the remains of the Tahi Miranda were scattered along half a mile of coastline.