Surf
Brett Archibald had been floating in the ocean for nearly 14 hours when he saw the boat he’d fallen off. It was relatively close to him—about 600 feet away—and he could see the faces of his friends. His tongue was swollen from dehydration, and his body was close to giving out. He screamed, frantically battling the current, but no one on the boat saw him. “I will never forget that moment until the day I die,” Archibald said. “I knew I had to stay alive until my mates came back. They came back; I could see their faces clearly. And then they sailed away. I don’t think I will ever get over the disbelief of watching that boat sail away.” Brett Archibald, close to death and painfully close to a rescue, was only halfway through his nightmare. He would spend another 15 hours in the ocean, bringing the total to a seemingly impossible 28 hours in the Mentawai Strait in between Sumatra and the Mentawai Islands.
It was April 17th, 2013. Archibald, a 50-year-old South African man, was on a surf trip with eight of his friends in Indonesia. Stressed from work, the vacation was to be a much-need break. His wife told him he needed to unwind and pushed him to join the trip. He was a fit man, used to discomfort. He’d spent time as a tank commander in the South African defence force before starting up a hospitality business. An avid cyclist and devoted family man, Archibald should not have survived. He did, though, and three years later, he wrote a book chronicling his ordeal: Alone: Lost Overboard in the Indian Ocean.
After more than two straight days of travel, Archibald and his friends finally boarded the Naga Laut, a chartered vessel, and set out for what he thought would be an amazing surf trip through the Mentawais. Soon after, however, something went wrong. Six of the eight became violently ill with a combination of some sort of stomach bug and seasickness. At after 2 a.m., he stumbled on to the deck of the Naga Laut in the driving rain, vomited repeatedly, passed out, and fell overboard. The boat kept on going, and he powerless to stop it. “I just watched the lights of the boat disappear,” he said. I screamed, I screamed with everything I had in my lungs, but I realized very quickly that they were never going to hear me.”
He remembers dreaming that his friends were pouring water on his face to wake him up to go surfing. In reality, however, he was floating in stormy seas, far from any land, and totally alone. “I have grown up around the ocean my entire life,” he told The Australian in 2016, three years later. “I knew I was 100km out to sea. It’s not a shipping channel, it’s the middle of the night. There will be no boats coming out. No one has seen me, they are sailing away.”
Clad only in shorts and a t-shirt, the expectation that his life was close to the final curtain was a reasonable one. “I heard this manic laughter – like a hyena – and I realized that it was me,” he remembered. “I was laughing at the absurdity of the fact that this is where I die.”
His thoughts turned to rescue. It was sometime after 2 a.m., his friends were all asleep on the boat and in all likelihood, his disappearance wouldn’t be noticed until morning, an expectation that proved to be the case. Some four hours later, when Archibald didn’t show up for breakfast, his friends panicked. The captain turned the boat around, alerted the authorities, and began searching for him. The currents in the Mentawai Strait are strong ones, and by that time, Archibold was far from where he’d initially entered the water.
That night, in the middle of a storm, Archibald was mercilessly pounded by waves. He swam aimlessly, intent only on keeping his head above water, vomiting up the copious amounts of seawater he was swallowing. It rained at some point, allowing him a tiny amount of fresh water. The sea was like lukewarm bathwater and the sky was grey, blunting the sharpness of the sun’s rays—three things that very likely kept him alive.
As the sun rose over the horizon with no sign of his friends, Archibald realized that he had drifted far off the course of the Naga Laut. He knew that rescue was unlikely; a needle in a haystack scenario, or more fittingly, a cork in the ocean. He thought often of the family he’d left at home. His wife, Anita, and their two kids, Zara and Jamie. “I heard her screaming in my head, ‘Swim, yer bugger, swim!'” he said of his wife. ‘You are not leaving me a widow with two little kids.’” He talked to his father, who had died some years before. He thought about what drowning was going to feel like. He thought about his body being found, bloated and fish-eaten. He thought about his own funeral.
As time went on, his body began to cramp up. His muscles seized endlessly, hampering his ability to swim. His head went under water more than a few times, and he drifted in and out of a kind of foggy consciousness. Jellyfish stung him and once, when he almost fell asleep, a pair of seagulls flew down and took a chunk of skin off the bridge of his nose.
“This thing smacked me on the back of the head,” he remembered. “I lifted my head up to see what on earth it was and out of the blue, this bird just exploded into my face,” he said. “I felt the bridge of my nose, blood started flowing. I didn’t know what had happened — I felt like someone had hit me with a baseball bat. These two gulls were just dive-bombing me, they were coming from nowhere, squawking and screaming.”
Hours later, he spotted the Naga Laut again. It had been more than 12 hours since he’d first fallen overboard, and he thought for a few short minutes that he was saved. It soon became apparent that he was not—the current was too strong for him to swim against, and his calls for help were whisked away by the wind. The Naga Laut, with his worried friends aboard, turned its bow away from him and motored off, leaving him alone once again.
It was around that time that he started to hallucinate. Dehydration and exhaustion were taking their toll, and he began to see things that weren’t there. He swam hard towards a buoy in the distance that disappeared as he got closer. The Virgin Mary showed up. Even the water, as warm as it was, was sucking away his body warmth. He knew he was dangerously close to death.
Although he didn’t know exactly how long he’d been in the water for, he knew he couldn’t last much longer. At this point, it had been about 18 hours. He alternated treading water and swimming every few minutes, trying to conserve energy as best as he could. Most people on earth would be dead by then, but Archibald is a different breed. “If you put 1000 people in the sea in those circumstances, said Professor Tim Noakes, a South African sports scientist who examined Archibald after the ordeal, “999 would die.”
Then something even more terrifying happened. According to Archibald, a blacktip shark showed up and bumped him in the back. Although he knew that blacktips aren’t normally dangerous to humans, it was still an unnerving encounter. “It’s weird, the human mind,” he said in December of 2017. “My first thought was, ‘oh he’s going to eat me.’ I remember lifting my throat and saying ‘buddy, just rip my throat out.'”
It investigated him for some time, hitting him twice but never attacking. Apparently, it didn’t like what it saw and disappeared, but sharks would remain on his mind. But it also had another effect: the adrenaline pumped and he found a renewed will to live.
By this time, numerous boats had joined the search. Also in the area was another surf charter called the Barrenjoey, which was captained by a man named Tony “Doris” Eltherington. He had navigated these waters for years, and he knew the currents like the back of his hand. He was determined to find the missing man, and he wasn’t going to give up. Archibald, however, didn’t know how long he’d be able to wait, and the sun was setting again.
As it turned out, he would spend another night in the ocean. The stars twinkled above him in the inky blackness, and Archibald came closer and closer to dying. Then, around 5 a.m., he spotted a tiny fishing boat. Behind it in the distance was an island. As he swam towards to boat, too weak to yell loudly enough for the fisherman aboard to hear him, he felt as though he had nothing left. The men didn’t see him, fired up their motor, and drove away. It was then that Archibald finally gave up. “When they sailed away, that was just me finished,” he said to The Australian. “I am not proud of it. This is the only part of the story that I hate sharing. That is a serious failure to me. I gave up and made a conscious decision to end it all. I swam under and looked up. I lay there just breathing and filling my lungs with water, almost welcoming that my life was going to end.”
It didn’t work. Archibald couldn’t do it. He swam desperately for the surface, choking on the water he’d tried to inhale to end his suffering. It was then that he saw the Barrenjoey. At first, he didn’t believe his own eyes, thinking it was just another hallucination. Captain Eltherington, however, was no apparition, and he spotted the floundering Archibald. He felt an arm wrap around him and heard a voice that said, “we’ve got you, mate.” Archibold, after nearly 28 hours straight in the ocean, was saved.
“I’m so happy I’m alive,” he said between sips of water on board the Barrenjoey. “I can’t tell you. Honestly, I wrote it off eight times. I’m not religious, but that guy up there was looking after me.”
After a thorough examination, doctors found something strange: Archibald was surprisingly okay. He’d lost nearly 15 pounds, his blood pressure was low, and he was badly sunburned, but other than that, there wasn’t much wrong with him. He didn’t even require hospitalization. And here’s the craziest part: after 28 hours lost at sea and incredibly close to death, he didn’t go straight home. Instead, on the advice of his wife, he finished the rest of his trip. “I talked about it with my wife and she encouraged me to stay on,” he said. “I needed time to process the enormity of what had happened.”
In the years that have passed since, he’s made some changes. He wrote a book about his experience, which can be found here. He does some motivational speaking, he built a new business, and he’s made his family his priority. As for surf trips… well, he didn’t stop those, either. The next year, he headed out to the same area for a reunion trip. Needless to say, it was less eventful than the first—and you can bet that uneventful was exactly what he was looking for.
