Holiday beachgoers were surprised to see a 20m fishing trawler stuck in the shallows at Mooloolaba Beach on Saturday.
Coast Guard and lifesavers got to the boat just in time and pulled it back out to sea.
Coast Guard Mooloolaba crew skipper Bill Asher said they were first notified about the vessel by the crew of a nearby charter boat.
“They said the trawler was drifting towards to the beach,” he said.
“We tried to call the vessel but we couldn’t raise them and we saw on our cameras that they were only 150m off the beach.”
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Coast Guard “raced” to the site and when they got there the vessel was essentially trapped in the shallows.
“The bows were sitting on the beach, so they were stuck,” Mr Asher said.
“We backed up to the trawler and some lifesavers ran our tow line to it. We applied 100hp for about 10 minutes and slowly pulled the boat off the beach.
“The boat was within five minutes of being beached on a falling tide, so it would have been high and dry.
“It (the efforts of Coast Guard and lifesavers) saved a big catastrophe. If that boat washed up on to the beach, it would have been a major effort to get it off.
“They would have needed a two-ton tugboat to come up from Brisbane.”
Mr Asher suspected the vessel, which had crew aboard, had experienced anchor cable issues.
“I think it failed. For some reason the anchor was dragging,” he said.
He said the vessel also required a hydraulic mechanic, who was taken to it once it was dragged into deeper water about a mile off the coast.
Mr Asher said there were challenging conditions.
“We were three hours into an ebb tide, when the sea stands up more, so there were 2-3m swells and there was a thunderstorm about,” he said.
He said it would have been quite a sight for the thousands of beachgoers.
“There were a lot of people looking at it, and there was a big surf carnival so.”
Mr Asher said they were called into action for a similar incident at Mudjimba recently.
“There was a boat (essentially) on the beach and its engine had conked out,” he said.
“It was in the surf life and the lifesavers ran a tow line to it and we pulled them into deep water. We work well with the lifesavers.”
Mr Asher said very few boats were on the water during the rough weather on Saturday.
“With the storms around (and bigger swells), there was only about half a dozen boats, so boaties do pay attention to the weather, which we are grateful for, because the weather is a big factor out there.”
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