My boat was metres from the shore when the waves hit

Boxing Day, 2004.

When the earthquake occurred at 06:30 (01:00 GMT), I was on a ship, heading to Havelock – an island in the Indian Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

Known for its silver sand and clear blue waters, the Radhanagar beach there was recently crowned “Beach Best Asia” by Time magazine.

My best friend from college and his family lived in Port Blair, the capital of the islands, for a decade and a half, but this was my first visit to the islands, where I arrived at Christmas.

We had planned to spend three days in Havelock and in the morning we packed snacks and sandwiches, gathered the happy children and went to board a boat from the Phoenix Bay jetty in Port Blair.

Not wanting to miss anything, I was standing in front, looking around, when disaster struck.

As soon as we left the port, the boat moved and suddenly the boat near where we boarded broke apart and fell into the sea. He was followed by a control tower and a power pole.

It was very impressive. Most of the people standing next to me were staring with their mouths open.

Fortunately, the stadium was empty at the time so there were no injuries. The boat was about to leave from there after half an hour but the passengers had not arrived.

One of the crew told me it was an earthquake. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was a 9.1 magnitude earthquake the third most powerful the largest ever recorded in the world – and is still the largest and most destructive in Asia.

From the northwest coast of Sumatra under the Indian Ocean, it caused a devastating tsunami that killed about 228,000 people in more than a dozen countries and caused extensive damage in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, the Maldives and Thailand.

The Andaman and Nicobar Islands, located about 100 kilometers north of the epicenter, suffered major damage when a wall of water, 15 meters (49 ft) high in places, hit land about 15 minutes later.

The death toll was 1,310 – but with more than 5,600 people missing and presumed dead, more than 7,000 islanders are believed to have died.

However, while we were in the boat, we did not realize the severity of the destruction that surrounded us. Our cell phones didn’t work on the water and we only got information from the crew. We heard about the devastation in Sri Lanka, Thailand and the Maldives – as well as the southern Indian Ocean town of Nagapattinam.

But there was no information about Andaman and Nicobar – a group of hundreds of islands scattered in the Bay of Bengal, located 1,500km (915 miles) east of India.

Only 38 people lived there. It was home to 400,000 people, including six tribes of hunter-gatherers who had been isolated from the outside world for thousands of years.

The only way to get to the islands was by boat but, as we later found out, about 94% of the jetties in the area were destroyed.

This was also the reason why, on 26 December 2004, we did not reach Havelock. The jet there was damaged and underwater, he told us.

So the boat turned around and began the return trip. For a while, there was a feeling that we might not get permission to dock at Port Blair for security reasons and we might spend the night at anchor.

This made passengers – many of them tourists looking for sun and sand – worried.

After sailing for several hours in dangerous seas, we returned to Port Blair. Because Phoenix Bay was closed due to morning damage, we were taken to Chatham, another port in Port Blair. The yard we dropped into had large, unsightly holes.

Signs of destruction were everywhere on our way home – houses were reduced to rubble, small overturned boats sat in the middle of the streets and the streets had huge gangs in them. Thousands of people were left homeless as waves washed away their homes in low-lying areas.

I met a distraught nine-year-old girl who had water in her house and told me she was about to drown. A woman told me that she lost all her wealth in the blink of an eye.

Over the next three weeks, I explained more about the disaster and how it affected people.

This was the first time that a tsunami had caused such damage to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and the scale of the disaster was huge.

Salt water destroyed many sources of fresh water and destroyed large areas of agricultural land. Getting supplies to the islands was difficult and the jets were inexhaustible.

The authorities carried out a massive rescue operation. Soldiers, marines and marines were dispatched, but it took several days for them to reach all the islands.

Every day, boats and coast guards brought people full of people displaced by the tsunami from other islands to Port Blair where schools and government buildings were turned into temporary shelters.

They brought news of destruction in their lands. Many told me that they fled with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

A woman from Car Nicobar told me that when the earthquake started, the ground started spewing foamy water at the same time as the waves came out of the sea.

She and hundreds of others in her village waited for rescuers without food or water for 48 hours. She said it was a miracle that she and her 20-day-old son survived.

Almost every day Port Blair was rocked by aftershocks, some of which were strong enough to cause rumors of a tsunami, causing people to rush to higher ground.

A few days later, the Indian military flew reporters to Car Nicobar, a fertile flat island known for its beautiful beaches and home to a large Indian army.

The deadly tsunami had destroyed the foundations. The water rose 12 meters here and while many people were sleeping, the ground was pulled under their feet. A hundred people died here. More than half were flight officers and their families.

We visited the villages of Malacca and Kaakan on the island which also suffered from the wrath of nature, forcing people to live in tents along the road. Among them were families who were broken by the waves.

A grieving young couple told me that they were able to save their five-month-old son, but their other children, a seven-year-old and a 12-year-old, were swept away.

Surrounded by palm trees on all sides, every house was in ruins. Some of the items included were clothes, books, baby shoes and a musical keyboard.

The only thing that stopped – surprisingly – was the explosion of the father of the Indian nation, Mahatma Gandhi, on the roundabout.

The commander of the army told us that his team had found seven dead bodies that day and we saw their bodies from a distance.

At the Air Force Base, we watched as rescuers pulled a woman’s body from the debris.

An official said that for every body found in Car Nicobar, several were washed away by the relentless waves.

After all these years, I still sometimes think about the day I took the ferry to Havelock.

I wonder what would have happened if the shock had come a few minutes earlier.

And what would happen if a wall of water hit the beach while waiting on the boat for us to board our ship?

On Boxing Day, 2004, I had a local phone call. The thousands who perished were not so lucky.

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