For Lynette Hartman, seeing the whales in Cape Town’s Hout Bay was to be the highlight of her holiday in South Africa. The boat trip last Saturday should have been the perfect, once-in-a-lifetime experience to celebrate her recent retirement.
Today, she knows it is a miracle she is alive after the excursion ended in catastrophe.
The Miroshga, the 36ft whale-watching boat, capsized.
South Africa boating tragedy survivor Lynette Hartman was on the boat with partner Colin Brame when it capsized
Lynette, 55, was trapped inside the hull for three-and-a-half hours with two other female tourists and British RAF veteran Peter Hyett, who sadly would not survive.
In the darkness and in waters famous as hunting grounds for great white sharks, they clung to one another, terrified, waiting to die.
Survivor: Anna-Marie Wever was aboard the Miroshga boat which capsized in Hout Bay, Cape Town killing two people
The three – Mrs Hartman, a former office worker from Cardiff, and South Africans Bronwen Armstrong and Anna-Marie Wever – survived only because they managed to find a tiny pocket of air in the hull of the catamaran.
But they could only watch helplessly as the ice-cold water claimed the life of 64-year-old Mr Hyett.
‘I was holding his hand while he drifted away,’ 35-year-old Bronwen told The Mail on Sunday.
‘He died before my eyes.
After he went I felt I was going to die.
I thought we were just waiting for it.’
They later learned the disaster also claimed the life of South African John Roberts, who worked as a crew member on the Miroshga.
Lynette was halfway through a fortnight-long holiday with her husband Colin, a retired police officer, and their son Matthew, 27.
They were also on the boat but were rescued unscathed. She, along with other survivors, was treated for hypothermia.
Little has been explained about how the disaster unfolded.
It is now being investigated by the South African Maritime Safety Authority.
The Mail on Sunday has spoken to survivors and coastguards who patrol the waters around the Cape peninsula.
They have hailed Lynette’s survival ‘a miracle’.
Last week, she told her mother Joan that she had lost hope of being rescued.
‘I thought I might not make it, and that help would never come,’ she said.
‘I just had to keep kicking to stay above the water and pray someone would come.
Reunited: Bronwen Armstrong, centre, with her rescuer Fabian Higgen, right, fiancee Casper Kruger, left
At last they did.’
She was one of 39 passengers on board the Miroshga when it set off to look for Southern right whales, leaving the harbour of Hout Bay, a fishing port ten miles south of Cape Town, at 1pm.
The sun was shining brightly but the conditions out at sea were rough, with a 25mph wind and 6ft waves.
The Miroshga’s captain, Gregg Louw, took his passengers to Duiker Island, a small outcrop of rock about two miles from Hout Bay, which is home to a colony of Cape fur seals.
It was on the return trip that the boat hit trouble.
‘One of the engines failed,’ said survivor Caspar Kruger, 40 – who is Bronwen Armstrong’s fiance.
‘The skipper turned the boat’s bow into the waves so the crew could get to the back of the boat to fix it.
But the boat spun around to face the shore and as it did, a huge wave landed on the back.
Tragic: Rescuers tow the charter boat ashore
There was water everywhere.
Then the second engine failed and another wave came and landed right on us.’
The crew of four handed out lifejackets as the Miroshga’s stern began to sink.
‘The water was coming in very, very fast and people were screaming, shouting, “We’re going to sink! We’re going to sink!” ’ said Bronwen.
‘A bigger boat came to help and some people jumped off.
As they did, another big wave came and the Miroshga flipped over. There was panic.’
Bronwen found herself inside the boat’s upturned hull with many others.
‘Everyone who had been on the bottom deck and in the cabin was now under the boat.
There must have been about 20 people under there,’ she said.
‘It was pitch black.
As the boat sank, floating debris moved closer to us, meaning we had less and less room.’
With the vessel’s upturned hull now pressing down on the passengers’ heads, they needed to dive down under the water’s surface in order to swim clear.
But their lifejackets made that impossible.
Passengers were screaming and struggling to free themselves from the debris threatening to drag them under the water, which was less than 10C – a temperature at which they would have been unlikely to survive for longer than an hour if they had been in open water.
‘I closed my eyes and when I opened them again there were just four of us: the British lady, an older Afrikaans lady, myself and the man who died,’ recalled Bronwen.
Peter Hyett, a retired council training officer originally from Bournemouth but living in Barry, South Wales, had been on board the Miroshga with his wife Suzanne, 63, and daughter Helen, 37, who survived the tragedy.
Trapped alongside Bronwen, Lynette and Peter was Afrikaans-speaking South African Anna-Marie Wever, who is in her late 60s.
It was Anna-Marie who found the air pocket that saved their lives.
‘There was a small place, like a cupboard, where lifejackets were kept and there was an air pocket,’ she said.
‘The water was so cold. I knew I must pull myself up into that space.’
The storage ‘cupboard’ in which the women found sanctuary was, in reality, no more than a section of the interior of the catamaran’s starboard hull – an empty space just over 6ft long and about 3ft wide and high.
‘The British lady was curled up in a ball, with her feet in the water,’ said Bronwen. ‘She was very panicky.
She was holding her knees by her chest and crying.’
Rescue: Workers carry the body of crewman John Roberts after the boat he was working on capsized
Bronwen added: ‘She was wearing shorts and she just kept saying that she was so, so cold.
She screamed out for help. In fact, she was screaming so much I had to tell her to stop because otherwise she’d use up all our air.
We all held each other’s hands the whole time.
I held the British lady’s hands so hard that she said I was hurting her.’
Tragically, Peter lost consciousness and slipped into the sea.
The three women banged on the inside of the boat’s rolling hull with an old aerosol canister in a frantic attempt to gain rescuers’ attention.
Eventually their desperate knocks for help were answered by a police diver shouting back.
It was 4.15pm – two hours after the disaster – by the time Bronwen was pulled into rescue co-ordinator Dr Cleeve Robertson’s waiting lifeboat by divers.
It took another hour and a half before Lynette and Anna-Marie were also saved.
Rescuers had to persuade the pair to shed their lifejackets so they could swim down and clear of the hull.
Lynette was treated for hypothermia and temporary blindness caused by diesel fumes.
Her eyesight is now back to normal.
Her father Edward said: ‘Lynette is crazy – she’s always going off doing these adventurous things. She is a very determined person.
I think that’s why she managed to survive this. We are so glad that she’s OK.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2220825/Miroshga-tragedy-Story-3-women-clung-hours-shark-infested-seas.html#ixzz29wDBvq1Y
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