Man who survived at sea for days after fatal boat trip describes 'chaos' as ship capsizes
An Australian man has reflected on the terrifying moment he climbed aboard a boat that capsized, plunging him into the mercy of the ocean for days on end.
Elliot Foote, of Sydney, was on a surfing vacation with his friends and girlfriend in the tropical country of Indonesia back in August 2023, when tragedy struck.
The then-29-year-old and his girlfriend at the time, Steph Weisse, and mates Will Teagle and Jordan Short, all climbed aboard a small wooden longboat traveling between Nias Island and the Pinang Surf resort in the Banyak Islands - which is located off the mainland’s western shore.
Two days later, he was floating alone in the middle of the ocean - dehydrated, hallucinating, and convinced he might never see land again.
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The boat had capsized during a brutal storm, killing one person and leaving the rest fighting for their lives for more than 37 hours. But the Aussie's fears came even before the vessel went down.
The ship was that small, a 6ft 1 tall Elliot was able to touch both sides of the boat, yet they were traveling 60km, which the motivational speaker insisted the vessel was not made for.
"It's just one of those things where you don't want to believe it's happening until it's go-time almost. So you're just kind of at the mercy of the guides and the captain and nature itself," he explained in an interview with UNILAD.
However, at the time the crossing was being undertaken, a storm hit near Pinang island off Aceh, a province on the northwest tip of Sumatra Island.
Reflecting on the experience, Elliot - who lives in Brunswick Heads, a town in New South Wales - said: "It's a pretty wild experience - as you'd imagine.
"The waves are kind of wind swells. So they're hitting you from every direction and they're not just one consistent angle. So the boat's rocking while it's launching and plummeting down.
"Then you have the wind, it's just whipping around in every direction. The rain is just pouring rain, flashes of lightning and that's what illuminates your vision. It's just, yeah, it's a lot of chaos to be honest."
The now-32-year-old went on to explain how a boat capsizing plays out - and you'll be a bit surprised to hear that it doesn't really happen like it does in the movies.
"Then the boat just slowly starts filling up with water and bit by bit, over the space of about an hour-and-a-half, it gets to a point where the water level on the outside of the boat is almost in line with the bottom of the window of the boat - and then when that's happening, it's game over pretty much," he explained.
"We were fortunate enough to have foreseen this happening throughout that hour-and-a-half and started drinking water, like squeezing honey down our mouths and getting warmer clothes on.
"By this stage, it's nighttime. It's pitch black - just besides the lightning, and then a wave comes in the window and at that moment it's get out, get out or go down with it."
He continued: "We all just systematically dove out the window, and then yeah hit the water. Then within about a minute of us exiting the boat, we'd managed to pull out three board bags with about four surfboards in each, and then the boat had completely flipped upside down."
At the time the boat capsized, all seven people on board had vacated and managed to all float together.
They spent that first night clinging to the board bags, which they had managed to fasten together, as well as a rope connected to the wreckage, as lightning ripped across the sky.
The only light came from the storm and flashes of bioluminescent algae glowing beneath the waves.
When daylight broke, they made a gut-wrenching decision after losing the rope connected to the boat - the Australians would try to paddle for land, while the Indonesians stayed behind in the vicinity of the shipwreck.
Soon after, the three Indonesian natives and the four Aussie mates split into two separate groups - that was the last time Elliot saw young captain, Fifan Satria. Tragically, the 22-year-old's body was never located.
While Eliot's group had managed to stay together, the Indonesians had been separated.
The four Australians spent the next day battling heat, wind and thirst.
"We had no food - no food at all, but to be honest, we weren't even feeling hungry. You're just thirsty the whole time, but in terms of water, we had about two sips each from a water bottle Steph had with her," he explained.
"There was rain every now and then on the first morning - up until about maybe 14 hours in. Steph and Jordan both had long hair but I had just shaved my hair off before the trip, so I wasn't accessing much water compared to them.
"But I had a wide brim hat on, which I could suck the brim of the hat and get some water.
"Unfortunately, the way the nature of the experience went, we were paddling into the wind with salt water splashing up onto our face and hitting the hat - so only a certain percentage of that water that I was getting on the hat was actually drinkable water, and the other bits I had to spit out as it was salt water."
As the hours ticked by, so too did their chance of survival, leading Elliot to make the decision to paddle off on his own and try and make it to land, with the four of them not knowing whether a search party had been launched to find them.
By the second night, he was completely alone and hallucinating - all while one of the largest meteor showers in the northern hemisphere was taking place in real life.
"On that exact night - August 14, 2023 - was the most amount of meteor activity, so the sky's falling all around me. Like in reality, there's bioluminescent algae in the water - so it's just glowing in the water," Elliot said of the surroundings, which encouraged his vivid hallucinations.
"Then I was surrounded by Australian native gum trees, which was a hallucination. I had a fox run next to me, had a dog run next to me, children under the water - there was a big harbor that I was within for a couple of hours with markets and temples and people walking around there.
"I spoke to a female entity. I paddled through that harbor wall, which was weird. There was a big scaffold in the ocean and that was all hanging around. Yeah, just some real wild s**t, really."
After almost two days drifting alone, a small fishing boat appeared on the horizon as he was paddling toward an island that he had spotted.
"The crew had no idea anyone was missing," Elliot said. "They just stumbled on me. They literally pulled a ghost out of the water."
When they got him aboard, Elliot could barely move.
"It was bittersweet," he said. "I knew I’d survive - but I didn’t know if my friends had."
Hours later, news came through that Steph, Jordan and Will had also been found alive - incredibly, one of the Indonesian natives had drifted for days on his own but the current pulled him to the exact same area as them.
Meanwhile, another boat helped pull the other surviving crewmate from the water. Only Fifan never came home.
Joe Yates