It took just seconds for Lisa and Tony Fogg’s 4WD to fill up with water after a freak wave slammed into it as they crossed a Gulf Country creek.
In early December, the couple were moving from Mount Isa to Kowanyama when they ran into trouble at Clark Creek, northwest of Staaten River National Park.
Lisa recalled their possessions floating around their heads and the worry that they wouldn’t be able to escape.
“The car filled up in probably about a minute, maybe two,” she said.
“You know when they say, ‘time freezes’, it didn’t freeze, it just went quicker and quicker and quicker so that it was quite frantic all of a sudden.”
The creek water filled the car almost to the roof when Lisa realised she could pop the passenger window out.
“I remember thinking, ‘I don’t want to drown; I’m not drowning today’.”
Lisa, Tony, and their two dogs Charlie and Daisy escaped out the window and swam through crocodile infested waters to reach the creekbank.
As they stood looking at their now submerged car, they realised the seriousness of their situation.
They were stranded in the middle of nowhere, with no phone reception, clean drinking water or food.
Luckily, friends at their destination had notified emergency services they were missing, however the search was hampered by flooded roads.
“It was like out of a movie,” Lisa said. “It was like, ‘how long are we going to be here for?’.”
The next three days and two nights would prove to be the toughest of their lives.
Tony used a pocketknife to build a shelter of branches and leaves to escape the scorching 40-degree heat and a 3.2 metre crocodile that stalked them during their outback nightmare.
“The first afternoon when I saw him, I thought, ‘oh, you bastard, I don’t need this too!’.”
The pair were ravaged by mosquitos, flies, sandflies, midges, ants and ticks, drank muddy creek water and could only manage naps of about half an hour.
The night before their incredible LifeFlight rescue, a thunderstorm turned the dust to mud and enabled them to carve out two large SOS signs.
Tony recalled thinking his wife and two dogs would likely die before help arrived, just before he heard the Mt Isa LifeFlight helicopter on December 7.
Tony said he initially thought the rescue helicopter was a plane.
“Then I heard the distinctive thump of rotors,” he said. “So, we both looked in the sky in that direction, and low and behold – starting small, and getting bigger, we saw the yellow and blue of the LifeFlight helicopter.”
Lisa had mistaken the sound of the creek for planes so when she heard the LifeFlight rotors and saw the rescue chopper overhead, she was ecstatic. It wasn’t until she was hugging pilots Mike Adair and Mark Overton that she truly believed she was safe.
“That’s it,” she thought. “We’re going home. We’re getting away. We’re alive. We’re going to live.”
“Then all of a sudden you hear the helicopter, then you see the helicopter, you look at it and you think ‘is that real?’.”
Tony said when he saw the helicopter, he was ‘absolutely stoked’.
“It was one of the best feelings I’ve ever had,” he said. “Total relief. I felt like I could stand down for a bit. I was in the hands of professionals. Everyone was around us. And we were in this cool machine, flying through the air.”
Lisa was put on a stretcher.
“He put Daisy on my lap, and she held on, and Charlie just sat between the two of us and then we were up in the air and getting away from it.
“We know that in all these isolated places, the only way you are going to get saved is through a LifeFlight chopper.
“They are the backbone of the outback, they’re the reason we are here, and I couldn’t be more thankful because it was hot, it was dirty it was desperate…there’s nothing, it’s just scrubby bush, so thank god for LifeFlight.
“If that helicopter hadn’t of shown up, I’m absolutely positive…we would have died. I don’t know about Tony, he’s a pretty tough bugger, but I know the three of us were on our way out.
“Boys, thank you, thank you, thank you boys for coming and getting us.”
