KEY POINTS:
Four boaties forced to abandon a sinking ship in darkness off the Fiordland coast had only seconds to scramble clear before the vessel disappeared.
Freezing worker Kevin Smith was with three mates on board the Solander heading from Bluff to Fiordland on a fishing and hunting trip that turned into a lucky escape.
"We really had to get out quick. Once we were in the liferaft it only took about 30 seconds before the nose came up into the air and [the ship] went down," Mr Smith told the Herald.
"It probably was a close call. Nobody panicked though, which helps. You don't have much time to think anyway, so you just do what you have to do."
The four were forced to take to the ship's liferaft when the converted fishing boat's equipment started failing and the vessel hit rocks about 7.30pm on Wednesday night.
"All our navigation equipment seemed to play up on us. Everything was dark and when [the equipment] went out, we didn't know where we were."
Wary of rocks, the crew tried to head out into deeper water but the ship slammed into two large ones. It immediately started to take on water, forcing the crew into the inflatable liferaft.
Cold and wet, the four men activated an emergency beacon and could only huddle under survival blankets in the liferaft and wait as they were buffeted by a 2m swell.
"We could hear the [waves breaking] on the rocks. We didn't want to get into [the waves] so we had to paddle out a wee bit to make sure we didn't go into them," he said.
The men waited for about five hours in the dark before their liferaft was detected, off Puysegur Point, by a rescue helicopter flying overhead.
"There's not much you can do. You just keep an eye out, see where you are drifting to. There wasn't a lot said really. I think everyone was confident we would get rescued sooner or later ... as long as we didn't drift away south or something," Mr Smith said. A nearby fishing boat, directed by rescuers, got to the men about 1.30am yesterday.
Maritime New Zealand said the men did everything right.
"It proves the point to having an emergency locater beacon that works. They had the beacon and set it off and we found them pretty quickly," said spokesman Lindsay Sturt.
Mr Smith said the close call might keep him off the seas for a while "but it can't put me off altogether".
