Johannesburg business intelligence consultant Alan Broderick spends a lot of time solving complex problems, but did not expect he would have to figure out how to save his life after a leisurely forest cycle ride turned into holiday hell.
He was found naked, waving to rescuers from a boulder on Monday in a remote ravine north of Plettenberg Bay. The 58-year-old survived an almost three-day trek through dense forest, enduring chilly nights clad only in cycle togs — which he took off during day time to keep himself dry.
At night he woke repeatedly, doing pull-ups and press-ups to stay warm. He drank river water to stay hydrated and sunbathed under gaps in the forest canopy to warm up.
Data analyst skills helped by focusing his mind on solving the problem of survival. “The only way I got through was to squash emotion and just think,” he said of the ordeal just days into a family Garden Route holiday.
He set off last Saturday along a mountain bike trail leading from a forestry station to the Bitou River Valley but got lost at a dead-end. “There were two occasions where I panicked. It only lasted a few minutes because it was so unproductive — I just ran around in a frenzy,” he said. “That’s when I realised I couldn’t allow myself to panic. I couldn’t allow my family go to bed for the rest of their lives wondering what had happened to dad.”
The Knysna-Amatole Forest covers an area of 3,100 km².
Having abandoned his bike, searching in vain for the trail, he decided to follow a nearby river. The problem was the cold weather, particularly at night, with wet weather also affecting air rescue efforts. The first night was spent in a small bush clearing and the second in the ravine.
At night he made a “duvet” out of yellowwood leaves. “I knew the river flows east to the sea, and I knew the sea was about 10 or 15km away. But what you don’t realise is that the river meanders so viciously.” The ravine was choked with bush and fallen trees, forcing him to crawl at times or climb over rocks and debris. He saw no sign of human activity, though rescue efforts were under way, and no animals other than insects and birds. He twice spotted a helicopter pass overhead.
“The second night was colder ... I was now closer to the river. On Sunday evening the first helicopter flew over. I rushed back for the river and thought they had seen me, but the chopper flew away. I can’t describe that feeling — just devastating.”
The near miss convinced him to stay close to the river in case the chopper returned, which it did once the weather cleared on Monday afternoon. He raced to a boulder in the river, but again it disappeared.
He did not know the crew had spotted him and had flown off to land and call reinforcements.
“We figured out he was going to be in the river,” explained pilot Duran de Villiers, a voluntary rescue responder who joined rescue efforts with two friends, based on their local knowledge and Broderick’s last Garmin signal. Studying the terrain they reached the same conclusion as Broderick — escaping via the Bitou ravine was the most logical choice. De Villiers aimed his helicopter for where they thought Broderick would be and located him soon afterwards.
De Villiers commended Broderick for his mental toughness and making it about 7km down the ravine — a physical feat given the steepness of the kloof. “I’ve done quite a bit of kloofing in these rivers and I know first-hand how thick some of these sections can be. If we hadn’t found him it could have taken five or six days to make it all the way down,” he said.
Broderick said he wasn’t sure he would have survived that long, despite carrying a few extra calories around his waistline which he factored into the equation. The big problem was the cold and fatigue. “I figured I had another day and a night in me,” he said.
At one stage his thoughts turned to the irony of suffering through life-threatening danger in the very same pristine environment he had set out to enjoy.
The experience gave him a new outlook on life: “I started realising a lot of things I worry about are just garbage. At that point all that matters is surviving, and everything else is almost insignificant. I think the one driving force was that they [family] had to know the story, dead or alive. I had to get to a place where they would find me and understand what happened,” he said.
In the end he got to tell them at Knysna Hospital. “I’ll never forget that moment, when I saw them on the other side of the sliding door. That is where I allowed the emotion back.”
He suffered no serious injury but was covered in scratches and bites from leaches, ticks, mosquitoes and spiders.
Lara, his daughter, was full of praise. “Tough is an understatement. He has a lot of scratches and bruises, but overall he is doing quite well. It really is an incredible story,” she said.
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