Screams heard above the storm

CHRISTMAS Island dive shop operator Simon Prince first thought he heard people cheering.

Rescuers from an Australian navy vessel drag asylum-seekers from the water after their boat was dashed on the cliffs of Christmas Island. Picture: Nine Network

CHRISTMAS Island dive shop operator Simon Prince first thought he heard people cheering.

Prince then looked out over the mountainous seas on yet another grey dawn to see an old Indonesian fishing boat precariously close to the island's jagged cliffs.

"At first it looked like they were OK," Prince told The Australian. "The backwash from the cliffs was keeping it away from the rocks. They were just being washed backwards and forwards."

Aboard the dilapidated vessel were between 70 and 80 asylum-seekers, terrified men holding on to the boat's crumbling infrastructure, women lying on the deck clutching small children, as one of the biggest seas in living memory pounded the coast.

It became instantly obvious to Prince that the "cheering" that ebbed and flowed across the island was in fact the screams of those who had risked everything to get to this very moment.

A tropical low to the northwest of the island had brought with it the most appalling conditions. Those conditions had forced an Australian Customs boat, which had in the previous 48 hours rescued another 100 or so asylum-seekers, to anchor on the lee side of the island and wait until conditions at Flying Fish Cove improved.

Locals called the police and began to collect life jackets, ropes, plastic containers and any other flotation device available, but they could only gather at vantage points and watch the unfolding drama.

As far as anyone could tell, only two aboard the stricken vessel were wearing life jackets.

Ivan Rodriguez, a Swiss scientist on the island for a conference on evolutionary biology, heard the yelling from his room at the Sunset Lodge and ran down to the cliff just after 6am (10am AEDT).

He watched the boat slowly follow a current parallel to the cliff for about 150m. The huge backwash from the rocks kept the vessel, which by this stage had lost all power, about 20m away from disaster, but it was only a matter of time - some say about an hour from the time the boat was first spotted - before a monster wave picked it up and hurled it down a face of water some say was more than 8m high.

"There was a really sickening crack," Prince said. "It was something I'll never forget. Next thing you know, the boat heads away. It didn't break up immediately . . . it was repeatedly smashed into the cliffs."

Rodriguez watched on as the boat "hit the rocks two times violently, and the second time the back part of the boat went down". "It broke off and everybody fell off," the scientist said. "But a few people managed to hold on to the front half of the boat."

Local Glenn Gibbs was ready to jump into the wild seas to save a girl drifting between the boat and the cliffs. "It was really hard to watch," Gibbs said, on the verge of tears. "I reckon I could have saved her by swimming out - (she) was right in front of us."

He said he tried shouting to some of the men clinging to the wreckage to get the girl, whom he thought was five or six, but they were hanging on for their own lives. Gibbs, who was talked out of jumping into the rough seas by other locals, said: "I don't think she made it."

He said everyone was desperately trying to yell out to the asylum-seekers to swim into deeper waters to avoid being smashed into the rocks but "a lot of them probably couldn't swim or understand what we were saying".

As the drama unfolded, more locals and onlookers arrived at the scene looking for ways to get involved, but most could only watch on helplessly. Some formed human chains to try to pull some of those drowning out of the dangerous washing machine-like waters, but were hampered by the huge swell that continued to smash into the cliff face. "Water was just gushing down on top of you," Prince said. "A lot of volunteers got hurt in the process. The cliffs - it's not smooth stone, it's jagged limestone. People got gashed up. There's quite a few people walking around with stitches now.

"We got the life jackets in the water and saved a lot of people, but not enough.

"I shouldn't call them waves because it's ocean swell, ocean rollers. The white water rains down on you from 30m high or more, and there was debris coming down on top of us as we were trying to help."

Rodriguez said the people in the water were desperately grabbing hold of floating debris. "There was so much debris that it was difficult to discriminate between debris and people, just heads that were out of the water," he said. "There were a lot of life jackets that were empty."

Documentary-maker Philip Stewart arrived at the scene at about 7am and counted seven people still visible in the water, including a woman and a young child. He said they were clinging to flotsam and jetsam that had been washed right up against the cliffs. "There were two small inflatable vessels trying to get in and they could not do it because of the waves being so high," Stewart said. "One chap jumped off a piece of flotsam and swam up to the navy and was picked up by a rescue vessel straight away. The other six, unfortunately, at various stages were thrown off their rafts and they disappeared.

"At the same time, they were being beaten and battered by bits of wood and planks and debris from the actual vessel that's disintegrated.

"To be honest, it was a horrendous sight."

He said the "terrible tragedy of this whole thing is we couldn't do a damn thing, not a damn thing to help anybody".

"And if the main navy vessel had got any closer, there would have been a double tragedy," he added. "So really, we watched until there was nobody left alive."

Another local, who did not want to be named, said he rushed to the cliffs after hearing the screams, along with his 20-year-old son and as many life jackets as they could muster. They tied life jackets to ropes and threw the ropes to the terrified asylum-seekers. "It was horrendous - we were pulling the ropes up and then it would go limp," he said.

"Unbelievable horror. There were literally mothers holding babies up on the boat before it hit. There was just nothing any of us could do."

He predicted that about 20 people in the water managed to get hold of life jackets that he and others threw out.

He said he spoke to a man who managed to climb up the rocks from the boat. The young man told him he was from Iran and had travelled on the boat alone.

He said the man asked him at hospital later if his friends on the boat were OK. "I told him the truth. I said, 'Probably half are and half are not'," he said.