The survivors of the deadly Enchanter fishing trip have spoken out for the first time to defend the skipper from the "crazy stories which are not only hurting us... but the families who lost loves ones".
Five Waikato men died and five others survived the March 20 tragedy off North Cape.
Te Awamutu herd tester Shay Ward, beekeeper Ben Stinson and Putaruru contract supervisor Jayde Cook are speaking publicly for the first time - "to put the story straight about how great a trip it was... until the wave" and to thank the rescuers who plucked them from the ocean after more than four hours.
"There's a lot of misconception about where we were, why we were there, should we have been there," Stinson said. "We want to clear that up and tell our story."
The group of Waikato blokes were almost all strangers when they took a call from Mark "Skid" Walker to travel on a five day charter to the remote Three Kings Islands, the holy grail of big game fishing.
Skid's father-in-law, 72 year old Geoff Allen signed up, along with Mark Sanders, aged 43, from Te Awamutu, Mike Lovett, 72, from Cambridge and the town's popular Group One Turf Bar owner Richard Bright.
When they left Mangonui on St Patrick's Day for the 12 hour push to the Three Kings, Enchanter Fishing Charters owner Lance Goodhew was at the helm with his deckhand of four years, Kobe O'Neill.
The jokes and the camaraderie kicked in as bluenose, kingis, hapuka, giant trevally and marlin jumped on, and off, the line during the trip.
"You have an expectation when you go up there and it exceeds it, tenfold," remembers Stinson who'd been to the Three Kings previously.
They were aware MetService was predicting heavy winds with squally thunderstorms across Northland into Sunday and very rough seas with 30-40 knot winds.
Lance Goodhew "gave regular weather updates a couple of times a day" and according to Ward "man they were so accurate and what we had was so wrong."
The men sheltered around the Three Kings islands and the Princes islands Sunday March 20 as high winds, rain and flooding battered those on land in Northland and Auckland.
It was on the journey home near North Cape that catastrophe struck.
It's a notorious stretch that's claimed at least four boats in 20 years, according to locals and commercial fishermen.
Five miles out you're in 400m water - that drops to 24 metres at the one mile mark - and when the swell gets bigger the waves stand up.
Shay Ward, the only witness to the "wave which was easily 10 metres", was out trolling on the back deck when he said it decapitated the solid Australian-built Enchanter.
"What I could see wasn't that big, but what I couldn't see was the big bit that broke and crested over the top of the boat."
"It's just something that got big right then and there. There's no time to yell out. It didn't register to me to yell out. I didn't think it warranted to yell out."
Newshub had three leading New Zealand oceanographers model the currents, and interpret the possible wave crest dynamics occurring at the time of the March 20 event.
Oceanum experts Dr Peter McComb, Dr Tom Durrant, and associate scientist Dr Kevin Ewans said rogue waves, once a maritime myth, are extremely rare but can happen.
They say waves of different frequencies travelling in different directions can sometimes superimpose to produce an individual wave significantly larger than those that precede or follow it.
"A wave is technically classified as a 'rogue' if its height is more than twice the average height of the largest one third of the waves," said Dr Kevin Ewans.
As these waves result from several waves adding together, "rather than rolling predictably along the surface, they can appear suddenly. They are usually very steep, increasing the danger to vessels," said Dr Tom Durrant.
"Sometimes they appear as a short-lived lump in the ocean, particularly near shallower spots on the seabed," adds Dr Peter McComb.
Enchanter's survivors are convinced that's what struck the 16.5 metre vessel, throwing them into the ocean off North Cape.
"A lot of people think the weather was terrible and I understand why because it was raining and pissing down onshore... but it wasn't like that out there. If you can leave a beer on the table in the boat, it's not that rough is it?" said O'Neill.
"The sea conditions weren't that bad...nothing uncomfortable, no one felt uncomfortable. It was a rogue wave, no one to blame. At all. Not one person," said Stinson.
Ward claims "it was massively wrong place, wrong time; there will be fishermen round the country who can relate."
Maritime NZ is investigating Enchanter Fishing's owner and boat skipper Lance Goodhew and the circumstances around the tragedy, which led to the deaths of Sanders, Walker, Allen, Bright and Lovett.
The Transport Accident Investigation Commission is also preparing a report to see if lessons can be learned "about the system."
Skipper Lance Goodhew's company has been spoken to before by Maritime NZ in 2017 for a near miss and the absence of clear maintenance plans, and fined in 2009 for 'working outside limits' off the West Coast.
He has been advised not to comment while the current investigations are ongoing.
The survivors say they owe their lives to those "everyday kiwi blokes being heroes" at Northern Rescue Helicopters who punched through bad weather to get to remote North Cape for the daring night rescue.
They're now launching a fundraising campaign to buy multiple ballistics helmets, priced at $5000 each, for the Whangarei-based helicopter crew.
To donate click here.
