Peril in the gorge: a gritty rescue at Grootkrans

A 74-year-old hiker was seriously injured after a fall in a remote gorge upstream of the Elands River Mouth, Eastern Cape, triggering one of the most demanding rescue operations in recent memory for NSRI Station 36 Oyster Bay.

The call came in just after 16:00. Station Commander Lodewyk Van Rensburg had been crop-spraying inland, in an area with limited cell signal. “Just as I drove out… my phone rang for the first time,” he recalls. “And I knew this was going to be a tough one.”

The hiker had fallen several hours earlier in a rugged section of the Grootkrans gorge. With no helicopter support available, Lodewyk and his team launched a 5.5-metre rescue craft and made for the Elands River Mouth – a notoriously hazardous stretch of coastline with steep cliffs, violent surf, and little to no road access.

“We’ve looked at that gorge before and thought about it, but it just looked too dangerous,” said Lodewyk. “We’ve never gone in there for training. But this time we had no choice.”

Winds were blowing 30 knots and the sea was heaving at 3 to 4.5 metres. Light fog settled as dusk turned to dark. “Luckily we caught water going in,” he said, referring to the tight window needed to cross a sandbank into the gorge. “We could hear the props taking on sand, but we made it over.”

The terrain was too treacherous for paramedics to carry gear to the patient. The rescue team provided a backboard and swam the injured woman out to the vessel. By then, it was pitch dark. “The spotlight doesn’t help much when it reflects off the water,” Lodewyk said.

The first attempt to exit the gorge failed when the boat became stuck on the sandbank. “We stood there for 15 minutes. I asked the crew how they felt, and they said, ‘It’s now.’” Timing their run between swells, they broke through the surf. “The second wave broke underneath the boat. We only just made it.”

With suspected spinal injuries and signs of hypothermia, the patient was kept stable as the crew navigated 12 nautical miles back to shore — at just 5 knots. “We were all wet, cold, and exhausted. It was about 9pm.”

Ian Gray of the NSRI’s Regional Operations Support Committee had anticipated the difficulty. “I knew it was going to be quite a hectic rescue,” he said. He drove down and helped set up landing lights at the recovery point. “They came in using those lights. It made all the difference.”

Later, Lodewyk reflected on the risk. “To be quite honest, I think the risk that we took was very high. But when the doctor told us that if we hadn’t taken her out that night, she may not have made it — it kind of changed the whole perspective.”

“It’s what we do,” he added. “But it’s also a reminder: we are always learning. And in this place, conditions are never the same twice.”