The Estonia, a large car ferry, went down in the Baltic in a force9 gale onthe night of September 28, 1994, killing 852 of the 989 passengers and crew. Paul Barney, a landscape architect from Berkshire, was one of the few survivors.

He was sleeping on a bench in the cafeteria on deck 5 at the stern when he was woken at 1am by a sudden bang. The ship was listing to one side and the angle was increasing. Tables and chairs began to slide. As the ship tipped further over he reached the doorway to the promenade deck, where he clung on. Dishes and glasses were crashing everywhere. There were no emergency instructions from the captain or crew and no life-saving equipment.

Barney expected to see passengers scrambling for their lives but many seemed unable to do anything at all. “People were just not moving,” he says. “They were frozen to the spot, almost waiting to be told what to do.”

Forcing every distraction from his mind – the strange groans of the ship, the careening objects – he worked out an escape route. By now the ship was on its side and the ceiling of the promenade deck had become a ladder of pipes and vents. Barney climbed up and found himself alone on the massive hull of the Estonia, battered by wind and waves.

At the other end of the ferry, 500ft away, he could see passengers trying to inflate a liferaft. He edged towards them, avoiding open portholes through which he could plunge back into the drowning ship. After helping to launch the raft, he jumped in at the last possible moment, but a wave flipped it upside down. The sea was alive with passengers thrashing and trying to climb to safety. After righting the raft, he managed to pull himself up and drag some others aboard.

As the Estonia sank, Barney and 15 others in his raft faced 32ft seas and 60mph winds. He remembers one passenger whom he nicknamed Mr Positive. As waves pounded the craft and froze its passengers, Mr Positive blurted out all sorts of cheery thoughts. He was “quite a vociferous character”, Barney recalls: “ ‘We’re going to be saved’, he would say. ‘They’re coming for us. It won’t be long’.” Some time before dawn Mr Positive fell silent, succumbing to the cold.

“Sadly, his positivity ran out,” Barney says. “I think he overcooked it. Emotionally, he let himself release too much. He was let down too often. And that would have taken its toll on him quite a lot.

“Obviously you’re on an emotional rollercoaster – big time – in that situation and he would have been . . . raising his hopes and having them dashed time and time again. And that would have really stripped him of his energy.”

Some passengers shook violently from the cold, screaming and thrashing until they lost consciousness. Two Estonia crew members were no help at all. Although protected by waterproof survival suits, they were in total shock.

Barney believes the line separating life and death in that boat was very small. Terrified and freezing, he says, “death seemed like a warm, safe place”.

He continues: “The overwhelming desire is to put your head down on the nice soft side of the liferaft and fall asleep. And that’s instant death.” So he refused to rest even for a moment: “I was very calculating. I had to keep myself alert and awake at least and I was always looking out for the next thing that was going to save my life. So that was the idea. It was always one next thing.”

Relying on yoga training, he concentrated on slowing his breathing and reducing his heart rate.

“It helped to clear my head and I could start thinking and functioning again. I just felt I hadn’t achieved everything I wanted to do in life and there was no way I was going to fall asleep and die of hypothermia in the middle of the Baltic.”

When dawn finally came, a rescue helicopter appeared. Barney was the last man pulled to safety. He didn’t let down his defences until he was inside the helicopter. As soon as he began to relax, his body was seized by terrible cramps: “I was in agony for an hour.”

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