Australian Skipper Tells of Terrifying Indonesian Tsunami

KOMPAS.com - THE Australian skipper of a surf charter boat caught up in the Indonesian tsunami watched the water being sucked away before a four metre wave hurtled towards him, breaking over his boat and catapulting it onto a nearby boat, which then burst into flames.

Lee Clarke, the skipper of a surf charter boat called Freedom 3, says that for some unknown reason he woke up and was out on the deck looking at the moon when the drama began unfolding about 11pm on Monday night near Kepulauan Mentawai, off Sumatra's west. The rest of his six Australian surfing guests, mostly from Clovelly in Sydney, were all asleep downstairs.

“It was bizarre, I just lay down for about 10 minutes and I got up, I don’t know why I got up, just intuition and I looked out at the moon and just looked around, then it started to unfold,” Mr Clarke, originally of Port Stephens, said.

“The water just started draining really hard and the anchor grounded. I looked and saw the tsunami breaking across the whole boat and before we knew it we were picked up and speared straight into the Midas.

“I’d say the wave was four metres conservative. It came right over the top deck of the boat. The bow of our vessel landed on the top deck of the Midas. We got catapulted.”

Mr Clarke estimates his boat was lifted three to four metres in the air before it smashed into the Midas, which was anchored nearby in the bay.

“Pretty much the tsunami came in and broke across the whole bay. It crashed right over the back of the boat, picked us up and catapulted as about 50 metres, 100 metres away and right into the vessel and the vessel caught on fire,” he said of the collision with the Midas.

“We were both up on the beach, the Midas was in front of us. Then a second wave came and I was able to start the engine and reverse out of there and headed for the sea.”

Mr Clarke said all the surfers from the Midas, were washed into the water. He managed to rescue two of them, while the others were washed several hundred metres inland, to the jungle.

He said one of them had been in the downstairs cabin of the Midas and was suffering smoke inhalation and was “as black as a chimney sweeper”. The other had jumped off on his board and had paddled desperately to get to the Freedom 3 to be resecued.