Douglas Robertson

And then my dad or my mom said, come on, Douglas, get on board.

And I remember getting into the raft and seeing everybody was sitting there orange.

you know, from the canopy of the raft.

They were just like an orange colour.

And I just thought to myself, I can't believe this.

I can't believe we're here now and I'm looking at this scene and I just don't know where we're going to go from here.

you know, to me it seemed impossible that we would survive the day, let alone what was to come.

There were some good looks in this.

Dougal had tied the dinghy that was sunk to the raft.

So we had the raft and the dinghy.

I had managed the handle where they tied to Lucette had come away from the coach roof.

So the dinghy, the raft had started to blow away from the wreckage, but the dinghy was now holding it back.

So the dinghy full of water was acting as a sea anchor and keeping the raft on the wreck site.

And that enabled us to collect some things.

My mother's sewing basket, a sail, the genoa sail.

In my mum's sewing basket was a load of treasures, you know, that would be very useful to us in the days and weeks ahead, you know.

It gave us time.

And if you go from when the whale struck to when we were sitting in the raft, looking at each other, I think about 15 minutes had gone past.

But the Lucette herself had stayed upright and afloat for two minutes.

Lucette went straight to the bottom.