“It was God the whole time. I kept on praying. I kept on
praying.
And I said to God, I’ll get baptised and all that.”
Austin Appelbee
Rod Lampard writes (6 February 2026):
Miracle at Sea: 13-Year-Old Aussie
Credits God and Prayer for 4km Swim that Saved His Family
You
don’t often see miracles win headlines.
This
one did.
A
13-year-old Aussie kid has credited God and the power of prayer for saving him,
his mother, and family from almost certain disaster at sea.
Austin
Appelbee swam 4 kilometres to get help after his mum, Joanne, brother and
younger sister were swept out to sea.
Recounting
the grim brush with catastrophe, Joanne said, her decision to send Austin for
help was “one of the hardest decisions she has ever made.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EViCusn1LAg&pp=ygUTb2NlYW4gaGVybyBhcHBsZWJlZQ%3D%3D
A
Family in Peril
The
family had rented a kayak and two inflatable paddleboards to cap off their
holiday in Quindalup, Western Australia, before heading home.
Joanne
said after losing two oars and flipping at least one of the paddleboards, her
younger son Beau tried to pull the family back in with the kayak.
However,
the kayak failed. It began filling with water, and “couldn’t pull the
paddleboards back to shore.”
With
the waves getting higher, Joanne recalled seeing the danger they were in and
decided to act.
Looking
around for options and seeing no boats to signal an SOS, she said sending
Austin was her only choice.
“I
would never have gone. I wouldn’t leave the kids at sea, so I had to send
somebody. Austin was the strongest,” Joanne told 7News.
Knowing
the hotel would be looking for them after they didn’t return the hired
inflatables, she said, “they tried to keep positive.”
“We
were singing and joking and falling in a lot. The waves kept getting bigger,
and the sun was going down.”
Hours
in, Joanna said, she started thinking Austin hadn’t made it and began
second-guessing her decision.
“Something
must have happened to him on the way,” she thought.
The
Young Hero
Filling
in the blank, Austin said it took longer to get back to land than he expected.
At
one time, he remembered “seeing something in the water, and was spooked by it.”
Thinking
about other things instead, like his “friends at Christian youth”, Austin said,
“All right, not today. I have to keep going.”
Being
slowed down by the flooding kayak and his life jacket, Austin ditched both and
swam the 4km to safety, taking him approximately four hours.
Both
were not helping, he recalled, so he “untied the life jacket and decided to
just swim to shore.”
“The
waves were massive, and I had no life jacket on. So, I just kept swimming –
breaststroke, freestyle and survival backstroke.”
It
was here that he began to pray.
“I
don’t think it was actually me, swimming,” Austin remarked.
“It
was God the whole time. I kept on praying. I kept on praying. And I said to
God, I’ll get baptised and all that.”
After
this, Austin remembers noticing changes he could see underwater.
This
helped him persevere until he “hit the bottom of the beach and just collapsed.”
Rescue
and Relief
Not
able to get help “because there were a lot of foreign people on the beach”,
Austin said he had to run two kilometres just to get to a phone.
He
then called Triple-0, and asked for a helicopter, planes and boats, calmly
saying his “family’s been swept out to sea.”
After
being swept 14 kilometres out to sea and spending 10 hours in the water, Joanne
and her two other kids were eventually rescued.
At
the time, though, Austin remembers thinking that he’d failed.
“I
thought they were dead. I had a lot of guilt in my heart, thinking I wasn’t
fast enough.”
He
told 7News that when he heard they had been rescued, he didn’t believe it.
Happy
they had survived, Austin said, in that moment, he just “couldn’t process how.”
Leaving
out any mention of God’s intervention and the “foreign people” bit — who were
either unwilling or not able to help Austin — the ABC inadvertently magnified the miraculous nature of the
survival story, saying,
“Geographe
Bay, like most of Australia’s coastline, sees its fair share of sharks.
“The
day before the family’s ordeal, a three-metre bronze whaler shark had been
spotted off the coast just a few kilometres away, while a two-metre shark was
reported at Quindalup the day after.”
Discussing
the young Aussie hero, the Western Australian Police said, “The actions of the
13-year-old boy cannot be praised highly enough.”
In
statements to the media, Police Inspector James Bradbury saluted Austin’s
“determination and courage.” ….
