Warrnambool man hits force nine storms on boat trip to Antarctica

It's the second time in a year he has had to face his own mortality after being pulled from the surf in March 2022 when he suffered a heart attack - dying for 30 minutes.

It wasn't all smooth sailing on his ocean adventure last month with sea sickness kicking in, leaving him bed-ridden and unable to eat for days.

He returned home to Warrnambool in February with frostbite to his toes and now faces a weeks-long wait to see if they can be saved.

Garry had planned to go on the sailing trip in 2022 and was just days before leaving when surfers had to come to his rescue off The Flume on March 4 after he suffered a cardiac arrest.

So when the opportunity to set sail came up again in December, he jumped at the chance.

"I planned this trip a year ago. I was ready to go. I was four days off going when I got dragged out of the surf," he said.

"I had six bypasses and I was dead for 30 minutes. It was pretty big.

"I was unconscious so I didn't realise any of this until three days later when somebody told me I was alright. I didn't think I was sick."

Garry said 12 months later it almost seemed like it didn't even happen. "But I've got the scars to prove it did," he said. "I feel pretty good. That's why I went on the trip. I thought 'who knows what happens tomorrow'.

"That becomes part of the looking forward, not too far forward. Just do what you can. You never know."

The trip of a lifetime took Garry on a 35,000-kilometre journey across the globe - 3000 of those sailing as a one of five crew members aboard Jonathan, a 49-foot yacht.

They set off from Ushuaia, Argentina, on January 4 for the five-day journey across the Drake Passage to Antarctica where they spent 20 days sailing the peninsula.

It's a trip not many people get to do. "I almost didn't myself," Garry said. "It was good to have done and now I know what enormity lies south of us.

"To think it is sitting south of us here in Warrnambool. It's just absolutely enormous.

"It was pretty amazing scenery. Awesome."

Going to Antarctica was something Garry always wanted to do. "And, environmentally, sailing to Antarctica seems to be better than going on a cruise ship or something like that," he said.

"I am a bit of a sailor. Off the continental shelf sailing or ocean sailing I haven't done.

"Not many would have sailed across Drake Passage on a little boat. Not many would have hit a storm on the way back.

"We hit a force nine storm coming back on the yacht - that's 30 foot waves and 100 km/h winds."

"We were on edge of coming back or not coming back."

Garry said the crew was locked down below deck during the storm otherwise they would have been washed overboard.

"I was feeling like I was being lifted and lifted, and you wondered when it was going to stop and the thing just drops.

"There's no noise at all until it hits the bottom and there's a bang like sledgehammers hitting the hull that's repeated every 10 or 15 seconds for 24 hours," he said.

Garry, like others onboard, got seasick and didn't eat for three or four days. "I was just wondering if it would end and if things would be alright, whether we would ever get back to land that wasn't moving," he said.

"It was a bit on the desperate side. Everybody was, even the crew, the captain.

"None of us had been through a storm like that.

"We did try to avoid it but we couldn't in the end."

The experienced captain - who had been around the world a few times and Antarctica four times - had never experienced a storm like that, Garry said.

There was one point where if the wind picked up even more they would have had to take their storm sails down which would have left them drifting.

"You wouldn't know what might happen. People were worried," he said.

They were in the middle of the force nine storm - the Beaufort scale rates a hurricane as a 12 and a nice day as a one. Luckily the wind didn't increase and they were able to make headway in the right direction.

There were sea sickness tablets on the boat "but in the end you just couldn't take any of them, it doesn't make any difference", Garry said.

And it was probably because he was so sick that he ended up with frostbite, he said. "You like to keep as low as possible and I couldn't eat or drink. Probably for 48 hours or more I was like that. I think it was the lack of movement that didn't promote circulation and I got frostbite because before that I was fine.

"I didn't feel cold. But it snowed a bit at sea. It was probably two to five degrees but with the wind minus 5 or minus 10. You have all your gear on but you don't notice your fingers and toes too much once they go numb."

Garry said he discovered the frostbite when he arrived home in Warrnambool in early February - the medics at hospital taking a lot of interest in his condition because it's not something often seen here. "I was there for 12 hours and now I'm waiting for the outcome to see if they will be alright or not," he said. "They're pretty black."

He said it had affected his feet generally but three toes in particular. "I can walk but it's like walking on cushions at the moment," he said. He said it would take two or three weeks to know whether his toes would be OK.

"If you discount the ocean crossings, which were pretty exciting, the cruising on the peninsula was fantastic," Garry said.

"We got onshore probably each one of the 20 days. We got amongst the elephant seals and penguins and went to the research stations of Argentina, Chile and the UK and Ukraine."

The sight of granite mountains up to 9000-feet high and huge quantity of ice and glaciers just falling into the water was just "incredible", he said.

To be able to go onshore and watch elephant seals fighting and lots of penguins going about their business, was "really quite amazing". "They don't really care that you're there," he said. "Everything was quiet. You could hear the avalanches of the glacier ice falling into the sea in the background."

The first stop was the volcanic Deception Island. "There was sulphur and smoke coming out of the sand. In 1990 it boiled with a volcanic eruption and peeled the paint off all the boats that were there," Garry said.

The island was once home to commercial whaling and sealing.

"All the rubbish from that has just been left there. People just walked out of the buildings and left all the stuff there - tractors, engines. It's all just gradually getting buried as the glaciers just push the soil like a bulldozer over everything," he said.

When they arrived back on land in South America, the boat's captain asked his fellow crew how he should promote the trip.

"I said: 'I think you promote it as an extreme adventure'," Garry said. "The excitement of getting through the storm and reaching land again, everybody was cheering."

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