A simple solo sail - a near death experience

6:41 AM Tue 29 Dec 2009 GMT

'Would they see him in time?' .

Tony Lister went for a simple solo sail and had to be rescued. It could have been different, but Tony survived, and his story is interesting for the reasons that he survived. Lister was sailing opposite the river mouth of his home port when he stepped on deck to rig a spinnaker. The choppy seas beneath him shunted the boat, bucking him off the deck and into the water.

Lister watched helplessly as his fully rigged yacht sailed away without him.

'Well, this is it,' he thought. 'Today I'm going to die.'

His wife, Erica realised that something was wrong when a call to his marine radio went unanswered.

'We had been talking earlier and she said she would call back about 3:15pm,' he said. 'When she couldn't get me on the radio, she called my cell, which went straight to the message service.'

This rang serious alarm bells. Lister always has his phone on.

'She waited, and tried again, then went to get a friend with some binoculars and had a look for me,' he said. To no avail.

By the time the coastguard boat launched at 4pm, Lister had been in the water for around one-and-a-half hours.

Word went out that Lister was missing, and the maritime community rallied, with fishermen, yachts, the port pilot boat, the Te Maru tug, a helicopter, and several people searching the shore.

'I didn't rate the possibility of rescue because the conditions weren't good,' he said. 'They had a big area and they didn't know where I was.

'In those types of situations, the success rate is relatively low, especially when you don't have an accurate starting point.'

His boat was eventually found floating 13 to 14 nautical miles away from where he went overboard.

'They checked that just to see if I'd had an accident or a heart attack, found I wasn't there, put someone on the boat to bring it home and carried on searching.'

Bobbing around on the sea, Lister had no way of alerting the rescuers to his whereabouts, and had to rely on them spotting him.

'I saw a yacht about a mile away and I tried to paddle to it, got half way, then it turned,' he said. 'It was a wee bit frustrating seeing boats so close, but it was difficult conditions and it was at that point I discovered that I had no whistle.'

But rescue wasn't far away.

'I didn't see the pilot boat until it was about 100 metres away. They hadn't seen me either. It was sheer luck,' Lister said.

But it was more than just sheer luck. Certain things that Tony did helped to lead to his rescue, others militated against it. That difference can make the difference between life and death, and the best mistakes to learn by are other people's.

by Des Ryan

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A simple solo sail - a near death experience

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