Surfer rides his way to survival in Samoa
A NEW Zealand man forced to ride out the Samoan tsunami on his surfboard thought he would be "smashed into the jungle" by the surging water.
Hospitality student Chris Nel, from Wellington, was on holiday on the south coast of Savai'i, Western Samoa, when the 8.3-magnitude earthquake struck on Wednesday morning.
"I went out early morning for a surf, then I felt the tremor — you get them all the time in New Zealand, so I didn't really think too much of it—then I went out in the water and caught a few waves."
Chris Nel surfed to survival.
Mr Nel had been in the water with an Australian man and four other New Zealanders when the first signs of the coming tsunami appeared.
"All of a sudden the water went really weird, it kind of glassed off and got really lumpy, then we started moving really quick, getting sucked out to sea," he said. "It was pretty scary looking back and seeing the reef completely dried up; it looked like a volcanic riverbed, it was just gone."
Mr Nel witnessed a "big-as spurt of water hit the shore".
"I was thinking, 'This is it, we're going to get washed away and smashed into the jungle'. We didn't know what was going on, we thought 'Why is no one coming out to help us?' but it turned out everyone had already been evacuated by that point."
"After about 35 or 45 minutes of floating around, we managed to time it between a surge to get to land through the reef channel." When he made it to shore, he saw that the surf camp he had been staying at had been destroyed.
"A lot of my stuff got washed out to sea and I found one of my surfboards in the jungle," Mr Nel said.
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