Down the lens of her camera, Ange Tedling watched the little boat duck through the rough swell, its lone sailor so determined to cross the treacherous bar beyond Yamba breakwall that his gaze never broke from the horizon.
The rundown boat, weighed down by multiple engines and missing a mainsail, rang alarm bells in Tedling’s mind. But she had no idea she was capturing the man’s final journey.
That evening, Matthew Clayton’s yacht would collide with the Ballina breakwall and sink, triggering a tragic emergency operation that ended in the deaths of two rescuers and marked the “darkest night” in Marine Rescue’s history.
Tedling, a traveller originally from Western Australia who has lived on a yacht for more than a year, had walked to the Yamba breakwall to photograph seabirds about 11am on May 4.
She was speaking to a fisherman when they spied a 20-foot yacht, called Orion, zipping towards the open sea.
“For a little boat, he was going pretty quick,” Tedling said. “I said to the fisherman, ‘This guy – surely he’s not going to go out today?’.”
The vessel was a “trailer sailer” – a boat so small you can tow it on a trailer.
It was not an ideal craft to handle the big, messy swell or to traverse the Clarence River bar where, two months before, a man and a woman had drowned after their boat capsized.
“The first red flag was no mainsail, and then the second red flag was three outboards,” Tedling said of the yacht. She later found out two of the outboard engines might not have worked.
“Three outboards on a little boat like that … that’s a lot of weight.”
Tedling watched Orion until the boat disappeared. “I basically said to this fisherman, ‘Shit, I’m really concerned about him. Like, I don’t know if I should contact the authorities’.”
The next morning, Tedling heard about the incident in Ballina on ABC radio, and called the coast guard to report what she’d seen in Yamba.
In the weeks following, Tedling said, she got to know the people who knew Clayton. He was from Caloundra originally and had been living on the yacht near the Calypso Caravan Park for nine months.
“He was down on his luck, and he didn’t have much money, and he had obviously chosen to live on his boat because he was experiencing severe hardship,” she said.
Notwithstanding his circumstances, Clayton was a man of character. A local takeaway business owner, quoted only as Dave, told Ballina News Daily that he would feed Clayton, and that the man would always return to pay for it when he could.
Clayton had spoken about sailing north towards Brisbane and had bought a cheap 14-horsepower engine online, Dave told the local news outlet.
On the morning of May 4, “he shook my hand and said, ‘I’m going today; I’m going now’,” Dave said.
“He said, ‘I’ll be right, I’ll give you a call when I get there’.”
Water police had allegedly moved Clayton on. NSW Police declined to answer questions about their interaction with Clayton, given the matter is before the coroner.
“He just didn’t really have a safe haven, and then he left because he eventually felt like he had not much choice,” Tedling said. “But the day he chose to leave wasn’t probably the smartest day.
“It doesn’t matter, anyway, because the vessel was not really a sea-going type, blue-water vessel. It’s more of a river boat.”
Bill Ewen, 78, and Frank Petsch, 62, died while responding to a call for help from a member of the public who saw the Orion yacht in distress off Ballina on the evening of May 4. Their rescue boat capsized in 2½-metre swells.
Clayton, who was in his 50s, was found dead after washing ashore. He was not wearing a lifejacket, although Tedling’s photos showed he appeared to be have been wearing an old, loose lifejacket when he set out from Yamba.
Clayton did not signal for help. He may have already been swept from the yacht by the time the alarm was raised.
“He probably didn’t have a radio,” Tedling said. “He may or may not have had flares. I really don’t know because it depends on what the wreckage shows. But if the boat was broken up into smithereens I doubt they’ll find much at all.”
NSW Police said there was a strong chance the yacht had broken up or had been moved in persistent rough conditions.
“Specialist divers from the Marine Area Command will assess the situation when conditions permit. However, any further action will be dependent on safety considerations,” police said in a statement.
“At this stage, recovery of the vessel is considered unlikely.”
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Angus Dalton is the science reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via X or email.