TWO British surfers escaped a quake-hit island yesterday after saving a local family and surviving on the beach for seven days and nights.

Ben Clift, 24, and Ross Mace-Nicholas, 26, rescued a heavily pregnant woman, a ten-year-old girl, a grandmother and a man in a wheelchair from the waves that hit the Indonesian island of Nias on Easter Monday.

The exhausted surfers landed in Bali last night after two days and nights at sea, a 13-hour drive through a vol-canic mountain range and two flights. As they showered and shaved for the first time in a week, they told The Times of their ordeal.

“The adrenalin was certainly pumping,” Mr Clift said. “It has been a very strange week.”

The pair, both from Cornwall, were staying in wooden shacks on stilts by the sea at the Toho Hotel on Sorake Beach, a famous surfers’ haunt run by a local man, Sikomi Wau, and his pregnant wife.

They were in bed when the ground began to shake last Monday night, Mr Mace- Nicholas said. “The stilts started wobbling violently. Then the next-door shack collapsed. We realised it must be an earthquake.

“We ran outside to see Sikomi with a torch checking his family was OK. Then Ben noticed the water level had risen about two metres. A couple of minutes later it was much higher than the high tide mark. That was when we realised a tsunami was coming so we helped Sikomi to rally his family. There was a disabled man so we ran to the bar to get his wheelchair and Ben started pushing him up the road. I grabbed the hand of Simoki’s elderly mother Rutomi.”

The road to a village on higher ground ran parallel to the sea with a paddy field on the other side. “We could not cut across the paddy field so the water was beating us,” Mr Mace-Nicholas, a professional surfer from Newquay, said. “Then the waves came. For the first three I braced myself and held on to the old woman. The fourth was more powerful and she slipped out of my hands. The wave slammed me into a building and it swept the old woman into the paddy field.

“That was the scariest moment of my life, feeling the old lady whipped from my hands. I swam into the paddy field to find Sikomi’s mother. He had made it to a building and threw surf boards into the paddy field. “I told his mother to cling to one and swam her to safety.”

Meanwhile Mr Clift struggled through the water with the wheelchair-bound man, Dedi, 22, whose legs were crippled by polio. “The first wave tipped him out of the chair into the water,” he said. “I was holding him in my arms and we were swept into the paddy field until we hit a palm tree and clung on to it.”

Then they spotted a ten-year-old girl, Angriani, hanging on to a guava tree. “Dedi said, ‘No, leave me, go for the little girl’,” Mr Clift, from Penzance, said. “It was a heart-wrenching decision to leave him.”

He grabbed the girl and swam her to safety before returning to rescue Dedi, who had pulled himself on to a surf board.

Mr Clift and Mr Mace-Nicholas returned repeatedly to the water, paddling around on surf boards helping Sikomi to rescue his pregnant wife and searching for others.

They then returned to the deserted beach to guard the hotel from looters, spending the next seven days and nights camping out in a second-floor room, living off coconut milk and rotten fish.

All the villagers from Sorake Beach survived, though others on the island were not so lucky. The villagers built makeshift tarpaulin shelters while the island was hit by aftershocks.

By Friday the two men realised that they had to get off Nias and begged the captain of a tug carrying petrol and paraffin to give them passage. They spent two uncomfortable days and sleepless nights at sea before a 13-hour drive across a mountain range on mainland Sumatra to the town of Medan. From there they flew to Kuala Lumpa, arriving in Bali late last night. “Our first meal was a McDonald’s at Kuala Lumpur airport,” Mr Mace-Nicholas said. “I don’t normally eat McDonald’s, but after the week we had had it tasted damn good.”

The pair left Cornwall on December 5. They spent a couple of months on Bali and four weeks on Sumbawa Island before travelling to Nias on March 5. They plan to spend the last four weeks of their trip surfing in Bali before returning to Britain.

Mr Mace-Nicholas’s mother said: “I can’t wait to have them home, but they love surfing so they are staying for the end of their trip.”

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Indonesia earthquake in pictures

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