Aussie, 65, recalls finding friends’ lifeless bodies in horror boat gas leak

For Andrew Dunn, sailing comes as second nature after 40 years boating experience. But one trip earlier this year ended in disaster when he found his close friends unconscious and unresponsive onboard his boat after less than an hour at sea.

The 65-year-old Aussie GP has revealed in an exclusive chat with Starts at 60 how he feared one of his close friends had died – while another was left temporarily blind – as, unbeknownst to him, carbon monoxide had begun leaking into their boat.

Andrew was taking his friends Richard, Kara and Vivien on a trip to Fishing Boat Harbour in Fremantle at the time. They had sailed for around 15 minutes up to Perth for dinner, before carrying on in the early evening. He recalled there being a light breeze at the time, so they zipped up all of the cabin windows of his 28.5ft boat, just leaving one open in front of Andrew so he could see out unobstructed, while the entire back remained open too. While Andrew focused on the horizon ahead, his friends cuddled up under blankets for the hour-long journey.

“The problem we now know is we had a problem with the motor,” he explained. “It wasn’t that the motor was putting out more carbon monoxide, it was that we were going a bit slower as a result of the motor, with the front pointed up.

“You can actually get carbon monoxide poisoning even in an open speedboat which is really scary. You get a circular movement that comes up and circles back. We have the front and the back window open – but that’s obviously where it got in, the back. We just obviously didn’t have a very fast flow of air.”

It wasn’t until Andrew was within around a kilometre from the harbour that he realised something was wrong. Nudging his friends, he had no response from any of them.

“I assumed they were all asleep. It was only as I tried to wake them up after about 45 minutes to an hour, I was still in the ocean but about to come into the port. I was still about 1km out,” he recalled. “I gave Vivien in the front a bit of a kick and she sort of sprawled with her arms wide open. He eyes were wide open too and just staring into space. When I grabbed her I thought she was dead. Her eyes were open but she just wasn’t responding.

“At the time, I just thought, ‘I need to get this boat in quickly by myself’. I assumed the drinks must have been spiked at the bar. I know with some you can get temporary blindness, and it can actually kill you.

“Then the other lady came round eventually and I just remember her saying, ‘I can’t see, I can’t see, I’m blind’.”

Suddenly realising he needed to get the boat in as fast as he could on his own, Andrew continued to try and rouse his friends and eventually got a response from Richard. Rushing them in to shore, the others eventually came round too but Kara was still unable to see.

“When Kara came round she was blind or partly blind for around two hours. It was her that we sent to hospital with Richard but they didn’t know what the diagnosis was until about 12 hours later,” he explained.

Unaware still what had happened, Andrew went home – as did Vivien – before going to work as planned the next day. While he’d had a minor headache himself at the time, he didn’t think any more of it. However, hours into his shift, he had a call from a doctor at the hospital asking him to urgently head in for treatment for carbon monoxide poisoning.

“They told us the carbon monoxide could dissolve the area around nerves and cause nerve damage,” he said. “That was a major drama wondering how damaged we all were. My wife wasn’t with me at the time, I was at work when they called.”

For the following three days, all of the passengers were treated in a hyperbaric chamber – with each stint underwater lasting around two hours. Luckily, having dived a lot throughout his life, Andrew was fairly comfortable with the daunting process.

Luckily everyone was okay, but it’s left Kara nervous whenever she’s onboard a boat. The pair of them helped reenact the terrifying experience for a TV show just months later and Andrew recalled seeing her stick her head out every few minutes to ensure she was getting fresh air. Andrew now has carbon monoxide monitors in both of his enclosed boats, ensuring it never happens again without warning him.

The experience hasn’t ruined Andrew’s passion for boating however and he now teaches sailing in his spare time, around his daytime job as a GP near Perth. He joked: “I plan to continue until the old body falls apart!”