By VICTORIA STONE-MEADOWS
A MONTROSE teenager has been awarded a commendation for bravery from the Governor-General for an astounding maritime rescue.
Jeremy Linton,16, his father and his friends set out into the bay in Portland Victoria at about 5am on Sunday 4 May to go tuna fishing.
It wasn’t long after they had gone past the breakwater and point before the swells began to increase and they decided to turn back to the shore.
“Just as we started to turn around, maybe 30 seconds to a minute afterwards, the swell had hit a reef and it jumped,” Jeremy said.
“I head my dad yell ‘look out, there is a huge wave behind us’ and we all turned around and we saw this huge wall of white water and you couldn’t see anything else.”
The wave caused their boat to capsize completely, throwing Jeremy’s father into the ocean and sucking himself and their two friends into the cabin.
“I saw the wall of white water then a second or two later it had already hit the boat, there was no time to process what was going to happen,” said Jeremy.
“It literally took a second after hearing the wave and I turned around and bent my knees, the wave hit the back of the boat and flipped the boat from the back and up-ended it.”
The captain had hit his ribs on the steering wheel and his head on the steel canopy before the three men were drawn into the cabin. “I didn’t know what was going on at first,” Jeremy said.
“I remembered putting the Esky under the front seat in the cabin and when I saw the bottom of the Esky floating next to me I thought ‘that’s not meant to be facing upwards.'”
He then realised he and his two friends were trapped in an air pocket created by the cabin of the capsized boat.
Jeremy realised he could escape the cabin by removing his life-jacket and ducking and swimming under the side of the boat.
In a miraculous display of courage he then returned to the cabin to rescue his two friends still trapped under the boat.
He explained to one of the men how to escape from the boat and demonstrated how to swim out and away from the capsized vessel.
“The skipper had hit his head and he was a bit concussed and didn’t know what was going on so I stayed under the boat until he was responding to me.”
The cabin was running out of air when he told the skipper to follow him to safety but he did not surface for five minutes after Jeremy.
“He was banging on the bottom of the boat when underneath and we had no idea what was going on,”
“It went quiet and we couldn’t hear anything and we had no idea what had happened. We expected the worse,” he said.
The four men then waited for more than an hour and a half in the pre-dawn cold before another boat came across them and helped them all back to shore.
It took the teenager approximately eight minutes to save himself and the two other men from underneath the capsized boat.
Jeremy remains humble about the experience and says he was surprised about the way he reacted.
“I was surprised that I went back under because I thought my first reaction would have been getting the hell out of there.”
“When I went back in it didn’t occur to me not to, I just did it,” he said.
Jeremy is honoured by his commendation for bravery but says having his mates by his side is a reward itself.
“It’s much more rewarding that your mates know what you’ve done and they are here because of it,” he said.
