Sole survivor haunted by boating tragedy

By PATRICK GOWER

Glyn Rees remembers the air ambulance crewman banging his finger into his chest.

"You've survived, mate, you've survived," he was shouting at me," says Rees. "Then he said: 'You are the survivor; you are the only one that lived'."

Rees had blacked out after spending an hour fighting his way at least 1km to shore from where fishing trawler Hunter II capsized and sank in rolling waves as tall as power poles.

It was 4.45 am and pitch black. With a lifejacket bound tightly to his hand, he kept count as 18 of the huge waves washed over him - he was desperate to stay afloat, to stay alive.

He had made a pact with his best mate, Jeremy Gray, that they would get to shore together.

Gray, the trawler's 27-year-old skipper, was flung into the sea with Rees when the boat flipped, and tied the thongs of the lifejacket to his wrist.

"We were mates," Rees says. "And we said we would get to shore as mates."

They were parted by a wave; Gray was lost. Trapped inside the sinking 10m aluminium boat were Gray's brother, Shane, aged 18, and their 17-year-old cousin, Cory Maniapoto.

"I was alone, yelling out to Jeremy. Then I could hear him yelling out for Shane."

All three drowned, and the bodies of the Gray brothers were never found.

The Hunter II sank on September 18, 1998, but the event's final chapter was played out in the Hamilton District Court this week when owner Mark Mathers was held partly responsible and fined more than $10,000. He was charged under the Maritime Safety Act with causing or permitting the boat to be operated in a manner which caused unnecessary danger to other persons, and operating the vessel without a Safe Ship Management Certificate.

Rees, now 31, took little solace from the sentence - he remains haunted by the waves.

The four left Raglan wharf the day before the accident and smoked a small amount of marijuana as they crossed the bar. They were not stoned when the fateful wave hit 24 hours later, he says.

The rest of the crew were asleep, the boat was without its dedicated anchor which had been lost on the previous voyage and it had shifted during the storm.

Rees says he was raising the makeshift anchor when a freak wave hit, hammering him to the deck.

"I was hanging off the bow, then I dropped off into the sea, and was floating there with no idea where land was."

He has not returned to the sea; he has not returned to work. "Life is precious," he says.

Now a plaque on Raglan wharf marks the three lost lives. Rees says so do Jeremy's daughters, Shanade and Dahlia, and Shane's sons, Harlen and Jahkhan, who was just 1-month-old when his father died.

"Sometimes even now I think I should be back there with them, that I should never have come back at all."