A fearless seven-year-old boy, father Maike Hohnen and his friend Stephen Jeacock set off for a day of fishing in the winter waters off Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. Started as an adventure trip, it became the worst nightmare for them. After all the ups and downs it’s a survival story of a 7-year-old boy stranded for 6 hours at sea.
For little Julian Hohnen, fishing is a pure passion. His mum, Susan Cork, remembers him having a fishing rod in his hand long before his first birthday.
“He’d even like practice at home as little kid just being able to walk “He was always into his fishing,” she said.
A survival story of a 7-year-old boy
It was a fishing adventure that the three companions set out on in June this year. They cast their lines 14 kilometers off the Caloundra coast where the fishing was good.
The three companions conceived a planned to sleep overnight on the boat, just as they have done at the same spot only a fortnight earlier.
They set the anchor and lay down. While they were sleeping, the anchor rope trapped around the outboard’s propeller, causing the back of the tinnie to be dragged underwater. The boat was filling up fast. Right after that, a tub including flares and life jackets fell underwater as the boat rolled over and started sinking.
Succeeding in to free themselves from the sinking boat, the group’s only survival tools were two white buckets. Julian said he hugged on one of the buckets “really hard”, with Mr. Hohnen telling the boy tried to revive his father.
All of sudden, Julian fell quiet as his father carried his head above the rough water as high as he could, sticking to a bucket. Mr. Jeacock clinging with the other bucket tried his best to guard the father and son against smashing waves.
One of the member called emergency
Luckily, Mr. Jeacock had managed to hold his phone as the ship sunk and dialed (000) as they stranded in the freezing waters, but because of bad weather, they had to wait until 6 am for a rescue-chopper to take off.
Until then, Julian’s “arms and legs were completely paralyzed and frozen,” while his head was “thrown back” and he could only manage small puffs of breath.
Meanwhile, he stopped communicating and the only way his father could know he’s still alive because he was breathing, and he acknowledged his father’s request to spit the water out. He was in an extremely critical state, and his father believed it would have been minutes.
“If he stops breathing, I just let go of the bucket and I don’t want to live myself,” his father Maike Hohnen said.
With no beat and medically dead for almost four minutes, Julian was hurried to Queensland Children’s Hospital in a critical situation. Julian was placed in an induced coma after suffering from severe hypothermia. His doctor Christian Stocker said medical staff had only “a little hope” he would survive without brain damage.
Contrary to all expectations after 18 hours Julian woke from his coma and talked to his parents and has since going on to make a full recovery.
