WRECK IN BASS STRAIT.

Manawatu Standard, Volume IV, Issue 221, 19 August 1931, Page 2

WRECK IN BASS STRAIT.

FISHERMEN’S PRIVATIONS. A moving story of storm, shipwreck and terrible privation is reported by radio from Flinders Island. Frank le Torree, a Frenchman, and Bob Tomas, a Czecho-Slovakian, fishermen, while operating in Bass Strait from their cutter Romp which they recently purchased in Hobart, wore wrecked at Cone -Point, Cape Barren Island, on July 30. It appears that the cutter was caught in a south-westerly gale. The anchor lines carried away, and then, after the crew had succeeded in getting sail on the vessel, the rudder carried away. Out of control, the cutter drove up on the rocks, and the crew barely managed to struggle ashore through raging seas before it became a complete wreck. They landed on the uninhabitated east end of Capo Barren Island, without food or water or equipment of any kind. Another crayfishing boat was sighted, and the marooned men made signals in a desperate attempt to attract its crew’s attention. Owing to the fury of the storm, however, these signals were unobserved. Then followed a dreadful trek by the •wrecked fishermen across the island. For two days and two nights they struggled‘through wild bush country, without a scrap of food, until they fell in with a party of kangaroo hunters from Cape Barren half-caste settlement. The men cared for them, and then passed them over to Senior-Constable Fisher, who, took them to Whitemark, Flinders Island, in the police boat Lullaby. There they received every attention possible. • ■ As the cutter was not insured, the men have lost practically everything they possessed.