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You don’t often see miracles win headlines.

This one did.

A 13-year-old Aussie kid has credited God and the power of prayer for saving him, his mother, and family from almost certain disaster at sea.

Austin Appelbee swam 4 kilometres to get help after his mum, Joanne, brother and younger sister were swept out to sea.

Recounting the grim brush with catastrophe, Joanne said, her decision to send Austin for help was “one of the hardest decisions she has ever made.”

A Family in Peril

The family had rented a kayak and two inflatable paddleboards to cap off their holiday in Quindalup, Western Australia, before heading home.

Joanne said after losing two oars and flipping at least one of the paddleboards, her younger son Beau tried to pull the family back in with the kayak.

However, the kayak failed. It began filling with water, and “couldn’t pull the paddleboards back to shore.”

With the waves getting higher, Joanne recalled seeing the danger they were in and decided to act.

Looking around for options and seeing no boats to signal an SOS, she said sending Austin was her only choice.

“I would never have gone. I wouldn’t leave the kids at sea, so I had to send somebody. Austin was the strongest,” Joanne told 7News.

Knowing the hotel would be looking for them after they didn’t return the hired inflatables, she said, “they tried to keep positive.”

“We were singing and joking and falling in a lot. The waves kept getting bigger, and the sun was going down.”

Hours in, Joanna said, she started thinking Austin hadn’t made it and began second-guessing her decision.

“Something must have happened to him on the way,” she thought.

The Young Hero

Filling in the blank, Austin said it took longer to get back to land than he expected.

At one time, he remembered “seeing something in the water, and was spooked by it.”

Thinking about other things instead, like his “friends at Christian youth”, Austin said, “All right, not today. I have to keep going.”

Being slowed down by the flooding kayak and his life jacket, Austin ditched both and swam the 4km to safety, taking him approximately four hours.

Both were not helping, he recalled, so he “untied the life jacket and decided to just swim to shore.”

“The waves were massive, and I had no life jacket on. So, I just kept swimming – breaststroke, freestyle and survival backstroke.”

It was here that he began to pray.

“I don’t think it was actually me, swimming,” Austin remarked.

“It was God the whole time. I kept on praying. I kept on praying. And I said to God, I’ll get baptised and all that.”

After this, Austin remembers noticing changes he could see underwater.

This helped him persevere until he “hit the bottom of the beach and just collapsed.”

Rescue and Relief

Not able to get help “because there were a lot of foreign people on the beach”, Austin said he had to run two kilometres just to get to a phone.

He then called Triple-0, and asked for a helicopter, planes and boats, calmly saying his “family’s been swept out to sea.”

After being swept 14 kilometres out to sea and spending 10 hours in the water, Joanne and her two other kids were eventually rescued.

At the time, though, Austin remembers thinking that he’d failed.

“I thought they were dead. I had a lot of guilt in my heart, thinking I wasn’t fast enough.”

He told 7News that when he heard they had been rescued, he didn’t believe it.

Happy they had survived, Austin said, in that moment, he just “couldn’t process how.”

Leaving out any mention of God’s intervention and the “foreign people” bit — who were either unwilling or not able to help Austin — the ABC inadvertently magnified the miraculous nature of the survival story, saying,

“Geographe Bay, like most of Australia’s coastline, sees its fair share of sharks.

“The day before the family’s ordeal, a three-metre bronze whaler shark had been spotted off the coast just a few kilometres away, while a two-metre shark was reported at Quindalup the day after.”

Discussing the young Aussie hero, the Western Australian Police said, “The actions of the 13-year-old boy cannot be praised highly enough.”

In statements to the media, Police Inspector James Bradbury saluted Austin’s “determination and courage.”

According to The Guardian, Bradbury also thanked rescuers, then reminded Australians about taking care around Australia’s oceans, given “how conditions can change rapidly.”