Overpowering distress for all involved in emergency as ocean beat man

AT 6.50am on Wednesday, an officer on the emergency lines at Midland's police operations centre in suburban Perth picked up the phone.

AT 6.50am on Wednesday, an officer on the emergency lines at Midland's police operations centre in suburban Perth picked up the phone.

On the other end was a man speaking rapidly in broken English. Howling wind, screams in the background and general audible chaos confused the operator.

While it may have been the start of another typical summer's day in the West Australian capital, it was a different story 2600km to the northwest, where a building tropical low had whipped up huge seas that were battering Christmas Island.

The caller was agitated and distressed, and although English was clearly not his first language, he would over the next two calls manage to communicate to the police operator that he and others were in serious trouble.

The triple-0 call, which had been channelled through Telstra's Sydney communication base and bounced to the relevant state authority within seconds of being made, had originated from the deck of an Indonesian fishing boat that had lost power and was being tossed towards rugged cliffs.

The fact a full-scale emergency was now under way was immediately relayed to the Australian Search and Rescue Authority, Customs and the defence force, along with the WA Water Police.

At 6.58am, the same operator received a second frantic call, relaying the same urgent message. This one was clearer. Then the third and final call at 7.05am.

West Australian Assistant Police Commissioner Chris Dawson would later tell reporters that despite the "broken English", there was enough of a level of understanding between the caller and the operator for authorities to figure out what was going on.

"The calls were able to be understood, so we were able to get a sense of what the call was about," he said.

On Christmas Island, as a growing number of onlookers started gathering on the cliffs to watch on helplessly, and as others began marshalling as many life jackets and flotation devices as they could muster, the massive backwash off the cliffs was the only force keeping the boat - whose lacklustre diesel motor had shut down - from the impending disaster.

Two minutes before the triple-0 operator in Perth received his first distress call (the island is an hour behind Perth and four behind AEDT), Border Protection Command in Canberra was told a vessel had been seen about 200m from Rocky Point, in heavy seas just north of the island's main bay, Flying Fish Cove.

At exactly 6am local time, 10 minutes after the first of the triple-0 calls was picked up in Perth, the Armidale-class patrol boat HMAS Pirie was told of the unfolding drama and asked to respond.

Part of the fleet that patrols the northern part of the continent, the Pirie was anchored off Ethel Beach on the lee side of the island, tucked in out of the atrocious conditions with the Australian Customs Service's ACV Triton.

The Triton is a 100m trimaran that was already carrying 108 other asylum-seekers who had been pulled from the Indian Ocean in the previous few days.

Thirty-one minutes later, Australian Federal Police agents reported to Canberra that they, along with so many other distraught onlookers, had watched the boat smash into the cliff face, "causing the people on board to be thrown into the water".

With the fatal combination of an angry sea and immovable rocks turning the wooden fishing boat into flotsam and jetsam, police and locals used ropes to tie, then throw, as many life jackets as they could to the screaming, terrified passengers, many of whom were children struggling to keep afloat in the crowded, swirling ocean.

At 6.35am, four minutes after the vessel slammed into the cliff, the Pirie requested the assistance of the Triton, which immediately weighed anchor and began steaming towards Rocky Point, about 8km as the crow flies but 20-25km by sea.

At 7.01am, a tender from the Pirie had finally arrived at the scene and began pulling survivors from the washing-machine waters around the 8m-high cliffs.

As locals risked their lives trying to get to the panicking survivors, another tender, this one from the Triton, arrived and began dragging those they could find aboard. It was now 7.22am.

Clump by bedraggled clump, the survivors were ferried back to the Pirie.

By dusk on Wednesday - after the most horrendous of days for the close, isolated community - the tenders had pulled 41 survivors from the turbulent sea and retrieved 28 bodies, many of them women and children.

Only one man is believed to have made it to shore alive without help from the boats, somehow managing to scramble up the rocks.

It may take days before all aboard the vessel are accounted for. Numbers remain unclear, with estimates ranging from 70 to 100.

No matter how many have died, one in particular will haunt local Glenn Gibbs.

He watched a girl drifting between what remained of the boat and the cliff at the height of the seemingly never-ending drama.

He was on the verge of jumping in to the sea to help the girl, who he guessed was about five or six. In the end, he was talked out of it by his mates for the simple reason that he, too, would have perished.

"It was really hard to watch," Mr Gibbs said, struggling with what he had just witnessed. "I don't think she made it."

ADDITIONAL REPORTING: DEBBIE GUEST