The tragic castaway tale of loss and survival you’ve never heard

FOUR decades on, the last survivor of the MV Blythe Star sinking tells of a failed search and an SOS call that was never made.

TEN men scramble into a tiny life raft, desperately cut themselves clear and watch a ship in its death throes.

The MV Blythe Star makes a final pitch, bow plunging skyward, and is swallowed by the ocean.

Soaked, shocked, adrenaline coursing through their veins, the men allow themselves a sigh of relief they haven’t gone down with her, and start the wait for rescue.

“Did you get the SOS off, George?” one asks.

“No,” says Captain George Cruikshank.

Hopes sink as fast as reality sinks in: Not a soul knows that they’re missing.

It’s October 1973, and this is the start of an almost-forgotten story of a failed search — an SOS call that was never made and a desperate crew lost for 11 days on sea and land that cost three of them their lives.

Seven men survived the sinking of the MV Blythe Star. Then they came home, and didn’t talk about it much.

Forty-two years on, the last survivor of that story, Mick Doleman, has finally spoken at length of the tragedy with Channel Seven’s Sunday Night — after his daughter encouraged him, as the last man standing, not to take it to his grave.

“It’s a story which should have been told, but hasn’t been, primarily because none of the men who survived ever wanted to talk about it,” says Sunday Night’s Rahni Sadler.

“Firstly, because it was too traumatic. Secondly, because that’s the code of the sea.

“It was a tragedy, and they never wanted it to be a story of heroism because three of them died. “Not only did these men not tell their families much more than they had to, but they didn’t really talk to each other about it — even in later years when some of them worked together again. It was a different time.”

Lost at sea: The MV Blythe Star.

It’s an incredible tale — made more powerful by Doleman’s stoic telling.

“The scariest thing is standing on the side of your world — a ship sideway on the ocean — and watching it disappear from under you,” he says reliving the desperate minutes as they abandoned ship.

They couldn’t launch their lifeboats, and were left with a flimsy rubber raft measuring just over three metres.

As their ship died, he recalls the relief.

“We all got off, all 10 of us. We beat it, no worries about it,” says Doleman.

“We couldn’t have been so wrong,” he says of the realisation that the captain’s inability to send off a mayday call meant rescue would not happen in a matter of hours — but days — if at all.

With painstaking reconstructions, Doleman’s tale reveals eight days of desperation — the loss of the first crew member, John Sloan, and his burial at sea.

Safe ... somehow: Doleman completes his remarkable journey of survival.

“That knocked us around. That rocked us,” says Doleman, fighting tears. “It knocked the stuffing out of us.”

By then the search had started, but rescuers were looking for a ship, not a tiny raft.

“The Tasman Sea can pitch up the best and it threw everything at us,” Doleman says.

“It would smash us down the front of a wave and the raft would fold.”

For eight days the crew suffered bitter cold, pounding seas, bitter cold, raging thirst. And sometimes, blessed delirium.

At one stage they drank their whole supply of water, convinced in their delirium that they were at a party, drinking beers.

Salvation of sorts came on day eight — when they hit land at Deep Glen Bay on the Tasmanian Coast. It would be another three days — and an another two deaths — before the ordeal was over.

* Sunday Night airs at 8.40pm Sunday on Channel Seven

Originally published as The tragic castaway tale of loss and survival you’ve never heard