Forty-nine souls lost at sea. Their lives marked for death.
Their fate in the hands of a handful of people.
It was May 2012. An island trader carrying 49 passengers and crew, including 10 women and six children, sunk in shark-infested waters off the coast of the Solomon Islands.
For three days, they drifted – exposed, exhausted, and unseen.
Their only chance of survival? Being spotted by one of the few search and rescue teams scouring more than 6000 square kilometres of endless blue.
High above the water in a search and rescue plane was volunteer air observer Trevor Jardine.
Only hours before, Mr Jardine was at home in Springwood.
Now he was on a plane with four others, searching for almost 50 people who for 78 hours were lost in dangerously turbulent waters.
But time was running out. Every hour that passed chipped away at the possibility of survival.
Then, in the distance – a flicker. A glint of colour. A speck of orange, amid a sea of blue.
“One of our pilots, out of the corner of his eye, spotted a speck out on the horizon,” Mr Jardine said.
“But it was only a momentary speck. It just vanished.”
In the unrelenting sameness of sky and water, that speck – orange against the infinite blue – was everything.
It was the color of a life raft. The color of hope.
The plane dipped lower. All eyes were on the sea.
“We flew out to where he thought he had seen the speck. As we were getting closer… we found the first life raft.”
It had been a fleeting glimpse, timed perfectly with the crest of a wave.
But in the seconds that followed, the raft had disappeared again, swallowed by the trough.
“When we found it again… we found another four life rafts tethered together.”
There, bobbing in the swells, were all 49 survivors. They were all exhausted, and some were dehydrated and sunburned. But alive.
The moment would become a turning point in what is now considered one of the most successful open-ocean search and rescue operations in maritime history.
It was the first ever incident in the Pacific Ocean that resulted in no casualities.
Had the pilot’s eye wandered even a fraction of a second later, the story might have ended in silence and saltwater.
“They would have continued drifting out into the ocean and all died,” Mr Jardine said.
Instead, it ended with cheers and celebrations. One of the survivors was so excited at the sight of the aeroplane that he fell off the raft and into the ocean.
Thirteen years have passed since then – almost to the date. Yet Mr Jardine can recall the story in incredible detail.
He did, after all, publish a book on the ordeal.
“There was not one fatality, not one injury amongst any of the 49 survivors.
“We felt we’d done a Bradbury,” Mr Jardine said – a nod to fellow Logan local and speed skater Steven Bradbury, who famously won Australia’s first Winter Olympic gold after all his competitors crashed in front of him.
“Everyone had been searching for days. We left on Saturday morning, got up there just after one and by four o’clock we found everyone,” he said.
While the entire crew survived physically unharmed, many undoubtedly suffered psycological injuries.
“The trauma of the experiences… would stay with each of them for the rest of their life,” Mr Jardine said.
But heroes emerged from the depths of chaos.
Of course, the captain was the last to leave the sinking ship – only after ensuring everyone else, including children as young as one year old, had evacuated.
“They were swimming through shark-infested waters to get the life rafts,” Mr Jardine said.
“One of the [survivors], James, was the third-last off the boat. He was a young 25-year-old and he had heard the scream of a mother who had lost her daughter.
“So James swam and rescued the daughter, then he rescued the mother and made sure they got to life rafts.
“And then he went back and rescued several more people, and finally got onto a life raft.
“It’s a very incredible story of survival.”
Mr Jardine, a former school teacher now aged 68, has been a part of the emergency services for more than 40 years.
Service is in his blood.
Mr Jardine’s father was stationed in Darwin when the Japanese attacked during 1942, and his mother was in the airforce.
Mr Jardine has written a second book, although it is not another tale of survival.
Rather, it tells the tragic story of the 60th Australian Infantry Battalion during 1916.
It includes the previously untold story of a group of soldiers called the “Needle Trench 10”, who were killed by a single artillery shell on the 26th November 1916.
For more than 100 years, the identity of one of these soldiers, buried in the Guards’ Cemetery at Lesboeufs, France, was lost.
“It is part of our history,” Mr Jardine said.
“It shows young people in particular, the sacrifices that the generations before them went through and what the were prepared to do to ensure our way of life.”
