Lovatt, who lives across the road from Surf Beach at Kiama, headed down to catch a few waves at noon on Sunday.

By chance his friend Mitch Burge was already in the water, along with a bodyboarder.

Lovatt admitted to Burge he'd been feeling fatigued for a while and hoped a surf would freshen him up.

He didn't feel his best on the first two waves, but it was the next one where everything went wrong.

"I caught my third wave, stood up and my head started spinning," Lovatt said.

"I fell straight off into the water. I knew that I had to get to the surface to get some air but I didn't have control of my body. I was spinning, I was dizzy and then I was unconscious, face down in the water."

That was went a boy on the path overlooking the beach saw something was horribly wrong. Thinking he'd been attacked by a shark, the boy yelled "Shark! Shark!" to Burge and the bodyboarder.

"We turned around," Burge said, "and he was just laying face down in the water. We quickly paddled over to him we picked him up and his eyes were closed. His mouth was shut and he was all purple. He had blood coming out of his mouth."

In waist-deep water they couldn't see his legs and didn't know whether he'd been bitten by a shark or not.

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They dragged him to shore where surf lifesavers treated him until the ambulance arrived.

Lovatt would spend the night in hospital before heading home on Monday - being told his ongoing fatigue was the result of pneumonia.

Since then he's been doing a lot of thinking, realising if his friend wasn't in the water, or if that kid wasn't on the path watching, he might not have survived.

"Without that kid there it would have been too much time, I could have been under just 20 seconds too long," he said.

"If I was purple after 15-20 seconds what would I have been like in another 30 seconds? Mitch would have seen me eventually, maybe when he went for his next wave - but that could have been a minute away, maybe two."

He's planning to take at least a month to get himself right before heading back into the water, and when he does go back he'll definitely be taking a friend with him.

"I'm always pretty worried about things but I've never been worried about surfing alone ... but now its definitely sunk in," he said, admitting he'd done it plenty of times before.

"Maybe this is someone telling me I need to slow down and be more careful about surfing alone."