Fire, water and escape through a tiny porthole

''I got out first,'' said James Finucan, who was also asleep below decks when the tsunami hit the Mentawai Islands on Monday night, causing a neighbouring vessel, Freedom III, to ram into the Midas, setting its engines alight.

''I stood waiting for him but Rob never came through … I just had to leave him there. I thought he had died for sure.''

But, somehow, Mr Marino had squirmed his way through a tiny porthole, barely large enough for a man's head to peek through, but surely not wide enough to accommodate Mr Marino's wide frame.

''I had opened it first, but realised there was no way to get through it, so I went through the door,'' Mr Finucan said. ''How he did it, I don't know.''

Mr Marino is also incredulous about how he wiggled through the porthole, located awkwardly above a sink in the cramped downstairs quarters. He says it took him several minutes of constantly twisting and turning amid the noxious fumes and intense heat.

''I just thought there was no way out but I thought I can't give up,'' Mr Marino says. ''I was left with two choices: you die or you do what you can to survive. I didn't want to die.''

Mr Marino thought his great friend, Mr Finucan, had died. While seven of the Australians had washed up into a jungle swamp, two others had floated in the other direction, out to sea, and were picked up by Freedom III.

It was an ''emotional reunion'' when the two parties joined up about two hours after the tsunami had struck.

Each of the nine Gold Coast men, all long-time friends, has an extraordinary tale.

It was, they said, three types of hell. The tsunami that first struck them was three to five metres in height and 500 or so metres across as it roared into Macaronis Bay, a popular surf spot in Mentawai Islands, all ferocious, foaming whitewater.

''It looked like a million trucks coming down the highway. That's how fast it was coming,'' Jethro Jones said. ''It took 10 seconds to get on to us, and that was at least a few hundred metres.''

Next came the fireball that engulfed the Midas, a 70-foot motor cruiser. According to Danny North, one of the crew, it took barely 30 seconds after the impact of the Freedom III ''for the lower deck to be completely engulfed in flames, which were licking the upper deck''.

The entire ship, the nine Australian surfers, skipper Rick Hallett, Mr North and four Indonesian men, went overboard. All of them jumped off the vessel, except for Mr Marino.

As they scrambled for something to hold on to, a second wave hit them, not whitewater this time but a powerful surge of water, ''like a super-fast river''.

The seven who washed up in the swamp spent the next 40 minutes being buffeted by powerful surges that pulled them towards the ocean, and then threw them back again.

Just metres away was the burning wreck of the MV Midas, a huge fireball which ''kept exploding and kept going bang, bang'', Jimmy Black said.

Mr Black was pulled repeatedly through the water and debris. At one point he grabbed the vessel's chef, Feri, and hauled him up a palm tree, which then toppled over in one of the surges.

Luckily they latched on to another tree, and Feri - who couldn't swim - was able to dangle from Mr Black.

''We were,'' Mr Jones says, ''extremely unlucky and extremely lucky.''

All of the men urged Australians to do anything they can for the Mentawai community and praised SurfAid, the aid group helping with the relief effort that also sent a boat to pick them up.

More than 100 villagers died, and another 100 are missing. ''We are totally safe but there's a lot of people missing out there,'' Mr Black said. ''They are unaccounted for and they are not on national registers, just living on little islands.''