Sailor tells the tale of live-saving voyage in teen years
Chaice Grant was on his first sea voyage when he spotted a yacht in distress – hundreds of kilometres away from land. What happened next?
Stories don’t end when they hit the news. For The Australian’s 60th birthday, Fiona Harari retraces a story for each of the past six decades.
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Chaice Grant was more concerned with brass than bravery. At 17 and the son of a fisherman, he’d coveted a life at sea for as long as he could remember. Then he realised his dream – and he found himself, quite literally, in deep water one frightening afternoon, with multiple lives depending on his young wits.
Today he insists he was no hero for what ensued. “It didn’t seem like a massive deal to me,” he says from his farm in a quiet corner of WA, a seeming lifetime removed from that winter’s day.
In fact his actions 20 years ago, in a remote speck of the Timor Sea, had consequences that were as enduring as they had been unimaginable when he left his Perth home months earlier in 2004.
In January that year, hoping to earn and save some good money, he had flown to Darwin and boarded the prawn trawler Titan, his home for the next five months.
As part of a crew of six or seven, he was the newbie deck hand, his first sea voyage a mix of sorting seafood, mending nets and cleaning decks.
The Titan, mostly trawling for prawns near Darwin, headed off the coast of Broome as winter approached. “It was my first trip away. We’d been out at sea for five months, no time off, I was just about to go home a few days after,” says Grant, now 38.
The crew was deep sea fishing for scampi when they received a message one morning in mid-June. “All we knew was there was a yacht in distress, and we were the closest vessel,” he says.
Abandoning its intended work, the Titan headed 110km away to the isolated Seringapatam Reef, 440km off the coast of Broome.
On the hours-long voyage, Grant and a second teenage deckhand remained on top of the wheelhouse, looking out for survivors in the endless sea.
“I can remember seeing a little dot on the horizon, and as we got closer it was the Petama laying on the reef and three people were standing on the reef up to their knees in water,” he says.
At 4.30 the previous morning, the Fremantle-registered Petama had run aground, rolled and filled with water, The Australian reported on Thursday, June 17, 2004.
Its skipper and two sailors had to abandon ship and launch an inflatable life raft, which later partially deflated. They sent out a distress signal, but as the trio waited in the water for close to 10 hours, hundreds of kilometres from land, they had no idea if anyone was looking for them.
“I remember thinking it would have been terrible for these three that were on the boat,” says Grant, “because they would have felt they were on the surface of the moon; it was so remote.”
That afternoon the Titan pulled up 200m from the breakers that were crashing on the reef: “We didn’t want to end up with two boats stuck there.”
The trawler’s crew considered taking a dingy out but as they debated whether it, too, might be tipped over by the waves, the yacht’s skipper was able to paddle up to the Titan on a surfboard.
The Petama was laden with multiple surfboards – its passengers were off to Bali to sell them, Grant recalls – but the skipper said his two exhausted companions were not confident of swimming. “And I said ‘Well would it help if I came out to give you a hand?’ ”
At 17, Grant was a strong swimmer and had earned his bronze lifesaving medallion yet the lack of fear he subsequently exhibited facing 2-3m waves and 20-knot winds possibly spoke more to his age than his experience.
Because the Petama’s inflatable dinghy had popped, it was of minimal life-saving use on its own, so the yacht’s skipper paddled back to the reef on his surfboard, and the 17-year-old deckhand from the Titan swam the several hundred metres beside him in his boardshorts – unconcerned then, as now, about the local sea snakes and sharks that might be lurking. As he says: “You’d be unlucky, wouldn’t you?”
Grant had grabbed a pair of rubber boots from the trawler, figuring they would protect his feet on the rough reef but they became an impediment as he kept being sucked back each time he tried to stand. “I got pretty tired and I can remember thinking I hope I don’t end up being the one who needs rescuing.”
Finally on the reef, he swam out to the life raft, and with the two passengers holding on at the back, he and the skipper pulled the partly deflated vessel towards the Titan. Struggling to get beyond the breakers, after 20 minutes Grant and the yacht’s three survivors were safely on the trawler. “They were pretty stoked to be on a dry deck,” he says of the trio, who were later transferred to a Customs ship.
And that, he figured, was the end of his story with the Petama.
“I gave those guys a bit of cash because they had left everything on the yacht, and never heard anything again.”
The Titan and its crew, meanwhile, remained at sea for a few more days before docking in Broome. In late June, after five months away, Grant flew home to Perth. The following day he turned 18.
He had a month off before returning to the Titan until the end of 2004, when, unable to save enough money, he abandoned his dream of a life at sea. “It was pretty hard work, not much sleep.”
Later he worked in the WA wheat belt and spent 10 months in England as a door-to-door salesman before landing his current job, operating a jumbo tunnel driller in an underground mine in the Goldfields.
And then, in March 2007, three years after his swim out to the Seringapatam Reef, Grant received an Australia Bravery award. A police officer had contacted him in the intervening months to ask about the rescue and let him know that his actions were to be officially recognised.
“Although aware of the risk of sharks or sea snakes,” his citation read, “Mr Grant volunteered to swim back … to help bring the crew members to the Titan … For his actions, Mr Grant is commended for brave conduct.”
It was an unexpected dividend from a story that, like the yacht at its centre, displayed unexpected endurance.
“It’s had a bloody colourful life,” says Bob Mazlin, who has never met Grant but who also has a lasting connection to this story.
Over two years and four months in the 1970s, Mazlin built the Petama in his Townsville garden, a labour of love that still reduces him to tears today. At 77, he has constructed multiple modes of transportation – a campervan and converted trawler among them – but the 40-foot steel-hulled yacht he started in his 20s has special significance.
“I was a builder, working with timber all my life,” he says from his home inland from Townsville. But he’d also learned to weld. “As far as building a boat, it was really just common sense to me … We just got a set of plans and I marked it out,” he says of his backyard effort that took up much of his spare time in the mid-1970s.
“I welded it all, sand-blasted it, painted it, fitted it out. It was beautiful. It came up real good, actually.”
He named the yacht after his fourth-born child and only daughter Peta, and after it was launched by his wife, Karolina, in 1978 “we just about lived in it”. There were countless weekends out on the water around Townsville, and several end-of-year excursions taking his kids and their classmates out to Magnetic Island.
Then a friend invited Mazlen on a tour of Cape York in a hired plane. “And I thought I’ve got to get one of these things. The yacht is so slow.” Around 1989, he sold the Petama to a mate, bought a plane and got his pilot’s licence.
Although he was sad to part with the vessel, he looked forward to a flying future. “I told the wife that’s it, I won’t buy any more boats.” And then a fortnight later he bought a powerboat, and a few years after that a trawler that he converted into a cruiser.
He was travelling through Cooktown in his home-made campervan in 2004 when he heard the Petama had been shipwrecked. He was upset. “I’d put a lot of heart into it.” And, he, too, thought that was the end of the yacht’s story.
Then in 2011, a man called him from the NT. The Petama had been salvaged from the far away reef in 2004, sold several times, and after sitting at a marina in Darwin for four years, was now being restored in Nhulunbuy.
Mazlin was soon in the NT for one last sail on the yacht that had been partially restored and whose mention still touches his heart. “We often think about it,” he says, and begins to cry. “It’s two years out of your life. Wonderful times. All the family times we had on it. I’m just getting emotional. We took that many people out on it. It was thoroughly well known and it was thoroughly well liked.”
On the other side of the continent, Grant has retained a sense of sentimentality to this vessel and its longevity. While it has not weighed heavily on the rest of his life – “it’s a good story but I don’t feel like some hero” – he has retained a reminder of that day.
As part of his award for rescuing the sailors, he was presented with a special pin. It languished amid his belongings for close to 20 years until last April, when he wore it for the first time on his wedding day.