The seas were pumping the night off-duty lifesaver Craig Zulian pointed a jet ski at the pitch black waves off Towradgi Beach and drove on, in search of a lost 15-year-old boy.
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The teen hadn't meant to be in the water after dark - alone, without his surfboard, being pulled further from the shore.
His board had snapped apart in five-metre waves off North Wollongong as the sun was setting. Perhaps thinking he would be better off unencumbered, he made the crucial error of undoing his leg rope and leaving what remained of the board to the sea.
A rip pulled him north. He fought it for a full hour. With no flotation aid, he grew dangerously fatigued.
On shore, his surfing companion had made it out of the water and raised the alarm.
Richard Walsh, of Police Rescue, called Balgownie's Mr Zulian, a 39-year-old veteran of Towradgi Surf Life Saving Club and a specialist when it comes to jet ski rescue.
The needle-in-a-haystack search and retrieval that followed, on January 30, was last Friday named Surf Life Saving NSW's Rescue of the Month.
Mr Zulian regularly trains others in how to use rescue water craft. But he had never been out at night, or in waves as big as those of January 30.
It took him two attempts before he got past the breakers at Towradgi.
He climbed over three metres of white water but had to turn when faced with a bigger wave right behind it - an unbroken wall of green.
Three or four metres on, an even bigger wave loomed.
"I couldn't turn; I had to punch through it," Mr Zulian said. "I put my head down, under the handlebars, squeezed the throttle and waited for it to hit."
Past the breakers, the sea was vast, "sloppy and windy".
Factoring in the current and the time the boy had been missing, Mr Zulian headed towards Fairy Meadow and looked 100 metres out to sea.
He was scanning the water about 300 metres north of Fairy Meadow Surf Club when a splash caught his eye.
He thought it was a shark at first. But it was a boy's head, bobbing on the water and - he could hear it now - screaming for help.
The teen, who was "down to his final gasps of air", according to the award citation, emerged from the water too fatigued to stand upright. Mr Zulian had to hold him on the journey to shore.
"You can imagine being out there for an hour and 20 minutes thinking, 'Is anybody going to help me?'," Mr Zulian said.
"If I hadn't have pulled up where I had, I wouldn't have heard him or seen him. It was just luck. A lot of things lined up."
Rather than navigate through the breakers at Towradgi, Mr Zulian drove into Wollongong Harbour and radioed for emergency services.
The boy stepped back onto land about 9pm.
It was only then that Mr Zulian, a father of three teenage girls, asked him how old he was and realised his youth.
"It sort of hit home a bit. I would have been pretty devastated the next day looking for a 15-year-old kid," he said.
NSW Ambulance transported the boy to Wollongong Hospital. According to Surf Life Saving NSW he has made a full recovery.
The award citation credits fellow Towradgi Surf Life Saving Club members Sonia Zulian (Mr Zulian's wife), Don Allan and Richard Walsh, as well as Nathan McKnight and Konrad Robertson, of Fairy Meadow Surf Life Saving Club, with contributing to the rescue.