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Hi hello everyone ,
this is a story I’m writing today about a survival experience that I had as a young boy .

That it really was my first close to death experience which occurred when I was around about seven years age one faithful night at inverloch.

My Dad curly senior had recently bought a new Boat it was only one year old when he got it.
It was a really nice tryhull configuration  centre console.
My dad used to go  out gar fishing  at night where you use a net to catch the fish and an underwater light and carry a battery and you waded through the water and mostly he caught garfish

 One night we decided to go gar fishing out in the boat for the first time ever . A family friend came along with his two boys . His name was
Gordon Harland his two boys  wee Cameron and Andrew who are both a bit older than me also came along , and me so there were five of us and we left in our big black Chevy towing the Boat down to the Inverloch boat ramp .
It was in the middle of the night. I’d say about 3 am and my night started off terribly as when Dad backed the boat down at the ramp it was back then just an open concrete ramp with no sides or anything.

It was pitch black and dad backed down and I opened the door to the car and stepped out into nothing as dad was right on the outer edge of the ramp , I plunged down straight into the freezing cold water over my head.
I thought that’s not a good start, or a good sign it wasn’t gonna be the first time that I touched the water that night.

It was calm in the bay perfectly calm , but we went up and down the whole bay two or three times with uncle Gordon holding the light and we did not even see one garfish , so Dad then in his wisdom decided we’ll have a look in the sand bar.
I think it was breaking between six and 8 foot waves.
I thought what  are we doing , the first time we went out there through the breakers , I felt very uncomfortable and uneasy and to my relief we turned around and went back out and we didn’t see garfish so for some reason Dad in his wisdom decided to do it over again but this time halfway through the bar , disaster struck.

The motor just stopped dead and by the time dad cranked it, it wouldn’t start so he had ripped the cover off the engine trying to see what’s wrong with it.
The next wave then hit the nose of the boat and it spun the boat  around so the transom faced the next wave.
I watched in horror as the next wave filled the boat up to my knees as the white water top just dumped right into the back of the boat.

The Boat went down a little bit and it did a big lurch and it flipped over and turned completely upside down.
The front of the boat had a big hatch in it and a big square kill tank built in the hull and me and Andrew stayed in there, for a while breathing in the trapped air inside the tank , it was peaceful in there.
You could hear the waves crashing on the boat from inside and it was like a comforting place compared to out on the other side .

Dad had dived down looking for us and Andrew got out first and then I also popped out .
But there was nothing to hang onto the upside down hull was so slippery and we were stuck in the pitch Black. All you can see was a little bit of moonlight was a wall of white water coming down hard on your head as the waves relentlessly kept crashing down on top of our heads with us all trying to hang onto the boat by any means , the boat had a handrail about 6 inches above the deck of the boat, so I put my legs through the rail and hooked on tight as none of us had a lifejacket on because they weren’t compulsory to wear in sand bars crossings in those days but they are now.

Dad managed to dig out a lifejacket from the hatch at the front of the boat and tried to put it on Andrew.
It slipped off and I watched that orange jacket disappear into the white distance of the water in under three seconds and gone completely out of sight.
That’s how much current was running at the time.

So picture is us three kids were at the front of the boat which was facing offshore into the waves. Dad and Uncle Gordon went on each side of the engine.
We got pounded and pounded and pounded non-stop. All I could see was white water coming down on our heads with a short break between each wave crashing and us kids  just couldn’t hang on forever every time.

Every time one of us kids got washed off and go flying towards the back like the life jacket either Uncle Gordon or Dad will catch us like a baseball and throw us as hard as I can back to the front of the Boat to try and hang on again.
This was relentless and I was so exhausted and thought this is it. We’re not gonna live and that’s a terrible thought for young boy to be having this head but it unfortunately it was reality.

All of a sudden out of nowhere we landed on the sand bar at point Smyth . We went from deep water to an inch water in one second.
I remember standing up for the first time in hours after being forced to swallow what seemed like gallons of salt water and for a little kid like me all I felt was I was absolutely blind drunk.
I couldn’t walk. I took three or four steps and I was stumbling all over the shop,  I was in shock and I landed flat on my face in the sand and shallow water , so I crawled out onto the hard sand .
And the sun was starting to come up and look in the distance. It was a Fishing boat coming our way and I think it was a young
Greg Mcwirk , he spotted us and picked us up , so Uncle Gordon and us three kids went back to the shore and I think he unhooked the boat trailer and dad had stayed with the boat to salvage her and uncle Gordon took us back to his place where  Mum and Auntie Dot were  there and they wrapped us all in blankets and gave us black coffee.
I’ve never drank so much coffee in my life but it helped us.

I think I took about a week to recover , and Dad managed to salvage the boat , but when they got it back to the ramp and they tipped  it back over all the way it was full of water so the pressure formed a crack the hull down the middle and split her in half so it went to Dad‘s workshop the Pagies garage and it stayed there for years and he bought some fibre glass materials and then he slowly repaired it back to get her going again , and at the end of the day what  actually happened to the engine and caused this disaster it was a brand-new Johnson 50 on the back and they had just gone to a new electronic ignition system that year , so it was a brand-new concept but what happened was the power pack for the electronic edition shit itself and that nearly cost our lives , so later on years after that was when Dad bought another boat it had twin outboards engines on it which was a built in safety factor , that actually works. It got tested a few times like one engine water pump might go bang and the alarm will go off and overheat so could run back in on one and engine It actually was a good idea .

But  I’ve never ever wanted to cross that bar again since that night I couldn’t handle the thought of going through it ever again .
But ironically, I fixed up that boat years after we finished diving and retired her , for it to be my first boat and one day I took my family my two kids Ben  and Dylan and my wife Pauli  we went through the bar.
I thought as it was a calm day it was time to face my Demons’s ,

I need to break my hoodoo because if I ever have to go through that bar in the future, I have to at least have the fear off my back and just go through there.
I will end up joining the interlock SES for a while and I went through there a few times the rescue boat but I just still felt uncomfortable going anywhere near it , I can’t handle it on the inside but I did manage to do it that day with them.
I didn’t tell them about it.
I didn’t want to frighten them, but I was feeling really nervous when I first hit the first wave on the way out that day .

But like I said I’d rather put my boat in a New Haven and drive around to inverloch , but nowadays you have to wear a lifejacket going through bars , it’s compulsory and also for any heightened danger situations and yeah they do save lives so back in the day we didn’t have to worry about it and I’m still on an exemption in my boat Tiger Ben you don’t act have to wear a lifejacket in my boat if there’s more than two people in it , but going through a bar crossing and in dangerous conditions its now compulsory to put them on and I can see why because you can’t put them or it’s difficult to put one on once you are in the water and you are panicking  ,

So always  be safe and enjoy you Boating regularly check your safety gear and be extra careful around bars , do your homework if you’re not sure don’t go through it .

That particular bar back then had probably killed three people a year and it almost killed me.
I was so nearly going to be one of them , but I survived to tell you all this story so that’s it for now have a good day, cheers xxx
Curlyg