Sailor says 'I looked like Frankenstein'

Garry and Lisa Blackwood had intended to sail to Tonga but the dreadful weather ruined their plans. Picture / Greg Bowker

She's not big on handicrafts but when Lisa Blackwood last did a bit of sewing it was with adrenalin - stitching up her husband's gashed head while on the high seas in 50 knot winds and rolling 7m waves.

Lisa and Gary Blackwood arrived in Auckland yesterday aboard the cargo ship Capitaine Wallis, which rescued them from their sailing boat on Monday, during an unexpected storm near Tonga.

Lisa, a Canadian, and the Scottish Gary had left nine days earlier to tour the Pacific after spending 18 months based in Whangarei.

The unscheduled return drew some tears for Lisa when they walked off Jellicoe Wharf into the hugs of friends Davy Boustead and Ian Palmer, Englishmen living in Whangarei.

Gary's head sported a fringe of long suture strings from the 23 stitches Lisa had put in.

He split his head on a railing after a wave hit as he was leaning over the side of the boat to pull Lisa back on board.

The boat had keeled over on its side and a wave had swept her off, leaving her attached by just her safety harness line.

At first he thought the cut was just a small one.

"Then I put my hand up and felt this huge hole. I got a dish rag and tied it round my head and started sorting out the debris in the cabin.

"Then I realised it was a bit more serious than first met the eye. It was down to the bone and you could see the flap of skin opening up.

"I looked like Frankenstein's monster."

We decided it should be stitched and Lisa said, 'How do you do this?'

I said, "I don't know. I'll hold it together and you stitch it. So we were bobbing up and down and Lisa's trying to stitch and she's going all over the place, and into the bone and stuff," Gary said.

Lisa was impressed with Gary's pain threshold - "we didn't even have any whisky to ease the pain" - but less happy with the post-operative quibbling.

"I finished and he asked what kind of knots I'd put in. I said just granny knots and he said it was meant to be reef knots. I was like, 'Well, do you want me to start all over?' "

The sutures were a last-minute inclusion from a Whangarei doctor.

"We would have had to use fishing line otherwise," Gary said.

After the accident about 4pm last Sunday, it was a six-hour wait before they heard the sounds of the RNZAF Orion which had tracked down their emergency beacon.

The pilot asked if they wanted to abandon the ship or sit the storm out. The pair had a 10-minute discussion - the weather was set to worsen, but the 10m Scot Free was uninsured and had been their home for five years - and decided not to take the risk.

About 24 hours later, a cargo ship had never looked so beautiful. Although the seas were still high, the Capitaine Wallis managed the delicate operation of edging close enough to the Scot Free to connect Gary and Lisa to life lines.

Timing their jumps to coincide with the waves pushing the boats up and down, Gary and Lisa jumped aboard.

They also threw a few bags of belongings onto the ship, but realised too late that the most important bag - with their passports, money, jewellery and documents - was still on the Scot Free, which was drifting away.

"There's not much you can do in that situation but cut your losses," Gary said.

"Both of us were safe and that was the main thing. Boats are replaceable. People aren't."