Drowning nightmare haunts Bill Carey

If rock fishers were forced to wear life jackets, former Kiama ambulance officer Bill Carey said he wouldn’t still lie awake at night, haunted by the sight of bodies floating in the water at the scene of a horrific triple drowning at Bombo 43 years ago.Mr Carey was one of those called to help rescue a family who were swept from the rocks at the Bombo headland while fishing on Saturday, March 8, 1969.But by the time experienced fisherman Lawrence Barrenger, 30, his son, Wayne, 7, and father-in-law Siemen van Huigen, 57, were spotted in the water, they were lifeless and it was too late for them to be revived.That day the sea robbed Albion Park woman Tjitske Barrenger of a son, a husband and a father.Over the years there were many other drownings off the rocks at Bombo.Mr Carey, who still lives at Kiama, told the Mercury he is still haunted by the sight of the bodies floating in the ocean - particularly when tragedies like this could be avoided.Yesterday he added his voice to those calling for life jackets to be made compulsory for people fishing off the rocks.‘‘You never get over seeing a body, and it’s 10 feet away from you, floating under the surface, and you’re not able to do anything,’’ he said.‘‘Had they [life jackets] been compulsory 43 years ago, I wouldn’t be laying awake of a night time, reliving the incident.’’ Mr Carey, who turned 67 yesterday, said there were more incidents that trouble him, including two young brothers who were swept away near Kiama’s blowhole while fishing one Christmas Day. One was not found for a week.‘‘I was just about to sit down for Christmas dinner - we lived at the ambulance station at the time - when the phone rang and it was just down the road ... near the Kiama blowhole,’’ he said.‘‘When we went down there, they’d got one kid out of the water, who I shot up to the hospital.‘‘The other one, he never surfaced for a week.‘‘I saw the packet their fishing reel had come in, and it had a person standing on the rocks fishing, catching a big marlin. It should have been a warning.‘‘They got their Christmas presents in Sydney; they came down to Kiama to have a Christmas lunch.‘‘They [the waves] come up all the time in Kiama - they’re not a freak wave, it’s just the sea.’’Mr Carey said life jacket rules would be easy to enforce.‘‘It’s never been easier to enforce something like this,’’ he said. ‘‘All they’ve got to do is have a good lens and just take a photo.’’