Two fathers stranded at sea were about to give up hope of seeing their children again after a jetskiing trip went horribly wrong ...

Battered by huge waves after their watercraft sank and now shrouded in darkness, best friends Ben Thomson and Gavin Smith fought to keep their morale up.

They chanted a poignant rhyme sang by their children where one shouted ‘love you lots’, and the other replied ‘like jelly tots’ in a desperate attempt to locate one another each time the waves parted them. A friend had raised the alarm but, onboard Broughty Ferry Trent and D class lifeboats, the crew were struggling to find the pair without an exact location.

‘It was like looking for a needle in a haystack,' Coxswain Murray Brown said. ‘We had been searching a massive area for nearly an hour. It was getting dark and I feared we wouldn’t find them so I called the Coastguard for Arbroath lifeboat and a rescue helicopter.’

Agonisingly, they had passed Ben and Gavin several times but couldn’t see them. Every time the pair saw the lifeboat go by, as they struggled in the Tay Estuary, they feared they would never be found. In their darkest moments, the men considered drowning themselves.

‘We were cold and tired from swimming against the current. When you are that cold, it was easy just to lie back and accept death,’ said Gavin, 28, who has a two-year-old son. ‘But we just tried to keep talking about the children to keep our spirits up.’

When the pair saw the helicopter go over their heads as well they thought their luck was out. ‘We thought: how do we finish it quick? Do we lie back, do we fall asleep, do we go under and take a breath?’ Gavin said.

Meanwhile Arbroath Coxswain Tommy Yule and his crew were also scouring the estuary. ‘I knew the tide and swell would be pushing the casualties south west, near the edge of the surf. The water was only about 50cm below the keel there. It was quite dangerous but I’ve been fishing the estuary since I was young, so I know every sandbank.’

The casualties were clinging to each other’s lifejackets, preparing to go under, when Gavin caught the lights of Arbroath’s Mersey class moving towards them: ‘Benny shouted at me to blow my whistle but I was so exhausted that no sound came out. He grabbed it, and started blowing. That’s when they heard us.’ Gavin said, ‘The crew shouted for us to keep whistling, they couldn’t see us but they could hear us. It was a massive relief, an amazing feeling.’ Arbroath Crew Member Andrew Spence remembers the moment: ‘It was almost a freak that it happened. Tommy took back the throttles just enough for us to hear a call coming in on the radio. That was when we heard the whistling. It was just good, old-fashioned lifeboating – using all our senses.’

The crew heaved the men aboard. After 3 hours in water at just 4–5°C, the pair were showing signs of hypothermia. Tommy requested the helicopter to evacuate them immediately. He says: ‘The helicopter winchman asked if we could stop the lifeboat pitching. We had to go into deeper water and stop but, even then, she was rising and falling 4–5m. It was tricky.’

Ben, 32, says: ‘I remember going up and spinning around. I just thought, thank God. When they brought Gav up, and I saw him lying there, it hit me – we were in a bad way.’ Their families were waiting for them at the hospital: ‘Not much was said, but there were a lot of tears.’

Ben says the experience has given him a new outlook on life: ‘I don’t worry as much but I no longer put myself in situations where I might not come home at night.’ The pair have become enthusiastic RNLI fundraisers too since the incident in November 2012. Ben says: ‘The RNLI is a charity and needs funds to keep it going. If the RNLI hadn’t been there, our kids would have lost their dads.’