Beau then tried to tow them both in with the kayak, but in the chaos the second paddle got lost and the kayak began taking on water.
As the current dragged them further from shore, Austin traded with Beau and attempted to paddle them to safety, but was no match for the unrelenting conditions.
The four were powerless against the growing swell and, despite several hours of paddling, they continued being dragged further out to sea.It was then, between 1.30pm and 2pm, Joanne made that heart-wrenching decision to see if Austin could make his way back to shore to save them all.
Despite his determination, the wind and the waves were doing him no favours.
“I knew it would be a long way, but the kayak kept taking on water,” he said. “I was fighting rough seas, the kayak dumped me a million times, I thought I saw something in the water and I was really scared but I was just thinking I was going to make it.”Austin tells of his heroics. Credit: Andrew Ritchie/The West Australian
After about two hours, he decided to discard the kayak and shortly after, took the life jacket off too.
Austin rotated between survival backstroke, breaststroke and freestyle for the next two hours, and did what he could to occupy his mind with happy thoughts.
“I was thinking about all my friends at school, and friends of my Christian Youth, and I just said, ‘not today’,” he said. “At one point I was thinking about Thomas the Tank Engine, just trying to get the happiest things in my head.
“I’ve got a girlfriend and I was thinking about her the whole time. She gave me her hair lackeys and I was just looking at that the whole time.”Eventually he made it to shore near Toby’s Inlet, two kilometres up the sand from where they set off.
He said his legs “collapsed” once he touched solid ground, but he quickly sprung to action again, sprinting as best he could all the way back to the hotel where, at about 6pm, he used his mum’s phone to call triple-0.
“I said, ‘I need helicopters, I need planes, I need boats. My family’s out at sea’. I think it was just a lot of shock,” Austin, who hadn’t eaten at all that day, said.
Out in the ocean Joanne had been trying to keep Beau and Grace entertained by singing and making jokes, but morale began to slip as night fell.
“As it got darker I thought, ‘there’s no one coming to save us’,” she recalled. “We were cold, we were shaking, and it was pretty terrifying for a while, then I lost my glasses, so I couldn’t see.”
Back on shore, as the rescue efforts got underway and time passed with no news, Austin began to fear the worst.
“I called Dad and was bawling, I finally realised that they were gone. I thought they were dead,” he said.
“I didn’t know where they were and how they were, and I thought they were dead. I had a lot of guilt in my heart because I thought I wasn’t fast enough.”
About five minutes later, he received a call saying his mum and siblings had been found.“There was a tense wait when the chopper asked what the condition of the patients was, and when they said they were responsive . . . it was just ‘how good is this?’, he said.
But minutes before the rescue, the situation took a distressing turn when a big wave hit the family, separating them.
“I could only hear Grace screaming. I couldn’t hear Beau, and that scared me,” Joanne said. “When the boat came and picked me up, I screamed that there was two kids in the water.
“I called out for Grace and I could hear her, and then all of a sudden I heard this other voice (Beau). We picked them up and it was the best feeling in the world.”./-
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