Boat capsize survivor shares his 12-hour journey surviving while stranded at sea

The FV Dianne went down off the central Queensland coast in October 2017. Survivor Ruben McDornan has shared his story with 60 Minutes.

Ruben McDornan thought he was going to die but he just kept swimming.

Stranded 9km from land in the Coral Sea off the Queensland coast, the fisherman who had just lost his best mates when their dive boat FV Dianne capsized swam towards lights.

The nightmare began in rough seas about 7.30pm, when what he believes was a rogue wave sent the boat reeling.

The men, one in the wheelhouse, the rest in the bunkhouse, felt the boat started to tip.

Ruben said he wasn't expecting wild seas and the storm grew gradually.

"We were getting a few side on rolls. It wasn't like the boat was continuously rolling. It was just a big roll would happen and I would brace myself a little bit," he told 60 Minutes.

"If I felt at any time that it was getting hectic, I would have got out of there. Then just one came out of the blue.

"There wasn't a noise. There wasn't a bang. It just did one roll, like it was, and just continued to roll.

In the pitch-black wheelhouse, there seemed to be no escape.

The door was jammed firmly shut as Ruben fought to open it. Suddenly, something gave way and he was out, fighting through a mess of ropes and equipment, somehow clearing the hull and popping up, lungs screaming, somehow free and breaking the surface.

Awash on the upturned hull, he waited for his mates to pop up too.

Instead, Langdon says, he heard noise inside — in what he thinks was an air pocket in the bunkhouse, he could hear at least two of his mates.

"They were trying to find their way out," Langdon says.

"He could hear hammering, he screamed at them, he was talking to them. At least two were alive for at least three hours.

"And then the boat sank."

For almost 12 hours in waters known to be home to tiger sharks, Ruben edged closer to land, driven by his blind ambition to not disappoint his wife.

But just after sunrise on that fateful morning in October last year, the cruellest thing happened. The outgoing tide dragged him right back out again.

"I thought, F**k. Do I swim or do I just bloody … Or do I give up?" he told 60 Minutes in a gripping, raw interview on Sunday night.

"Is it easier just to drown yourself or something? It was hard. It was just where … I just felt like I failed. But I just quickly snapped out of that. So I just went, 'Right. Well, I'm going to go down swimming, give it everything I've got'.

"If I die, it's because I've died from exhaustion of trying."

Ruben McDornan (second from right) posted a picture of the Dianne crew on Facebook. Photo / Facebook

The luck that washed him out to sea turned in his favour. A sailing boat off the coast of 1770 near Gladstone headed, by pure coincidence, right for him.

He shouted to those aboard who originally did not see him. They dragged him over the hull, ending a traumatic experience he will never forget — one he has not talked about until now.

Ruben survived but his six mates never came up for air after a freak wave flipped the boat in darkness.

The bodies of two of his mates — 30-year-old Adam Hoffman and 45-year-old Ben Leahy — were located by police divers.

The rest of the crew — Eli Tonks, 39, Adam Bidner, 33, Zach Feeney, 28, and Chris Sammut, 34, have never been found.

It's a survival story which journalist Allison Langdon says is "nothing short of miraculous", told by a man still grappling with the horror, and loss of six of his closest mates.

There's the physical pain of 12 hours spent in the water, alone, knowing your mates have gone, swimming, floating, talking in your head — and sometimes out loud — to the wife you promise you're coming home to. And there's the mental pain of knowing you were the only one to survive.

"Every day," he told Langdon, "I'm back in that wheelhouse."

"It haunts him because he asks himself every day why was he the one who got out? Could he have done more to save his mates?" Langdon told news.com.au ahead of the broadcast.

"And it doesn't matter which way he looks at it, there was nothing he could have done."

Ruben is finally telling his story as both a tribute to his mates and as part of his campaign to make people safer at sea.

Ruben and his mates were "sluggers" — specialist sea cucumber fishermen — on a trip from Cairns down to Bundaberg collecting the Asian delicacy.

They'd stayed in port the night before because of rough seas, but this night, had agreed to head out, wanting to "slug" their way home to their families.

Ruben said his mates never stopped trying to get out. Once they went silent, he "broke down".

"The whole thing of that I've just lost my mates and my brothers (hit me)."

His dive watch told him it was 11.20pm. There had been no time for a mayday call. No time to set off an emergency beacon.

Ruben did the only thing he could do. He started swimming towards the lights of the 1770 headland he could see about 10km away.

He tells Langdon he got through by talking — in his head, and out loud — to his wife, Sammy, determined to come home to her.

"He said the worst part was when he realised at dawn he'd overshot the headland."

He kept swimming. Treading water.

By pure luck, a catamaran — the only boat out that day — somehow chanced on him as he floated kilometres off shore.

Shaking, exhausted, he reportedly told his rescuers: "I'm just so glad to see you."

Nine months on, Langdon says it's the darkness he talks about, something "we can't ever imagine".

"On a dark night in the bedroom if you shut your eyes — that's not as dark as what it is in the water in those conditions," she says.

"That sense of when the boat sank and he knew his mates were gone. How lonely would that have felt?

"Ruben's story is powerful and tragic and raw and it's uplifting. And when it ends, I feel angry that more isn't being done to protect these young men that go out to sea."