Jet-skier survives 30 hours adrift

A Christchurch man who spent more than 30 hours adrift on a jet-ski 13km off the Canterbury coast has his wetsuit to thank for his survival.

"If I had only gone out in my boardshorts like I had been thinking, it probably would have been the end of me," said 26-year-old Nathan Maclure.

Maclure survived two vicious storms, hailstones, jellyfish, sharks, and the numbing cold of a night spent bobbing off the coast before he was picked up by a Russian fishing boat on Saturday evening.

The strong currents dragged Maclure from the mouth of the Waimakariri River as far south as Lyttelton Harbour and then returned him 30km up the coast to near his original entry point.

From the safety of his parents' Halswell home, a tired and sunburned Maclure described how an afternoon "wave jumping" with a friend off Kairaki Beach on Friday turned into a harrowing and near-fatal ordeal.

Maclure said he stayed out after his friend returned to shore about 1.30pm.

His Sea-Doo jet-ski broke down soon after.

Unconcerned, he pulled out a "safety sausage", a two-metre-long red windsock and waved it for fellow jet-skiers and fishermen on the shore to see and waited to be rescued, but no help came.

An attempt to swim to shore with the jet-ski roped to him proved fruitless and the current began to drag him south.

At one point he was level with Sumner Beach but decided against ditching the jet-ski and swimming in, as the current was strong and he did not want to be without the craft if he failed to make it to shore.

As night fell a storm rose and the temperature plummeted.

"All night long I was fighting the storm. Every now and then a wave would come and hit you off."

Maclure said his hands were numb and his teeth chattering.

He became drowsy from the cold and stopped himself nodding off by singing songs and doing exercises.

Maclure said he swung between optimism and despair.

His parents were away until yesterday and he knew the alarm would not be raised until then.

On Saturday morning, the warm sun revived his spirits and he looked down and saw a school of jellyfish. Then, to his horror "three eight-foot-long (2.5m) sharks engulfed the jellyfish in seconds".

The sharks ate the school next to where he sat and then began tapping their noses against the underside of his jetski, Maclure said.

"After I saw the sharks, I was not going back in the water."

The sky darkened in the afternoon and he was pelted by a hailstorm.

Maclure had to face the hail to see the waves that threatened to overturn him.

Just as he was preparing for a second night adrift, he spotted a Russian fishing boat that he managed to attract with his windsock.

He swam the last 50m to the boat, the Ivan Golubets.

He climbed a rope ladder to the deck and the crew winched his jet-ski on board.

He was 13km off the coast.

The fishermen fed and clothed him and radioed the coastguard, which sent a boat to collect him. He arrived back at Kaiapoi on a Ashley-Waimakariri Volunteer Coastguard boat about 9.30pm.

The captain of the Ivan Golubets, Yuri Dzhambulatov, said Maclure was in shock.

"Our doctor gave him some tranquillising pills and he had tea with the doctor, but the ship to take him back came in less than an hour."

Maclure had been spotted about 6.45pm, about 13km offshore from Kaiapoi.

"He was about 1.5 miles away from the ship a dark spot that stood out against the background of the greenish sea. He started to swim towards us, and we had to ask him to stop, because the ship was approaching him too fast.

"We then threw a rope and he tied himself up and we lifted him. He wasn't too cold in his wetsuit but he was apparently rather shocked and very tired.

"He was just really lucky that we were there at that time. I don't know how long a search would have taken for him."

Coastguard New Zealand southern region manager Cheryl Moffatt said a jet-ski was equivalent to a boat from a maritime perspective and some type of communicator should be carried.

Constable Stephen Carbines, of the Kaiapoi police, said Maclure had experienced "fairly harsh conditions" and was "extremely lucky".

Carbines said Maclure should have had an Eperb (electronic positioning emergency radio beacon) because the safety sausage was not widely recognised.

Maclure said he would get his jet-ski back from the trawler when it docked at Lyttelton this morning.

"I'll be back out there next weekend with a GPS unit," he said.

- © Fairfax NZ News