My Newest Stuff Non-Fiction On The End Of A Wire - The Peter Davidson Story (2004)

Pennon Publishing , 160 p, paperback

Peter Davidson is the mobile intensive care paramedic – the guy on the end of the wire – who saved eight lives at the disastrous 1998/99 Sydney to Hobart yacht race. The waves were 80 high – almost touching the helicopter skids, and the wind was 160 kph. So you’d have to say my friend Davo certainly had lots of courage! So much that he was awarded the Bravery Medal (Australia), the Aviation Laureate (USA), the Captain William J Kossler Award (Canada) – plus he met Queen Liz and Phil the Greek.

People who will enjoy it: Davo has been on the speaking circuit, and has therefore created a motivational story that everyone can enjoy. Of course all yachties will enjoy this book. There are already two books telling this story, neither being written by those actually involved in the rescue. So this is a real insider’s view of what happened, as we interview everyone who was in the helicopter as well as crew members who were rescued. Plus the story is being told by Davo himself, who was the human tea bag at the centre of all the action.  

Available from:

•Your local bookshop,
•Pennon Publishing, pennon@ihug.com.au
•Your local library. Or if they haven’t got it, ask for inter-library loan,
•If you’re lucky, your company will send you to one of Davo’s speaking appointments, where you can buy signed copies from the man himself.

Raving on: Peter Davidson has turned modesty into an art form. I met him at Darling Harbour where he was addressing a few hundred people, dressed in his paramedic’s uniform. Shyly he told his story to this group of suits, a group as far removed from a life of action as possible. He received a huge standing ovation – one minute, two minutes, three…it went on and on, leaving me puzzled how this understated guy could send a crowd crazy, more than speakers who leap and bound throughout their presentation.
After this, we went somewhere else and I started taping him, and we became friends. Everyone speaks well of Davo, and in working on this book together, I certainly understand why.

‘If you don’t have a go, you’ll never know’

An interview with flight paramedic Peter ‘Davo’ Davidson
who rescued eight people at the disastrous 1998 Sydney to Hobart yacht race

Peter Davidson is a mobile intensive care flight paramedic and team manager. For the past 17 years he has been employed by Rural Ambulance of Victoria and the last 13 years he’s been working on Helimed One the Victorian air ambulance rescue helicopter. Like every paramedic, Peter is constantly in the business of rescuing people, and all rescues are dramatic, but the 1998-1999 Sydney to Hobart rescue was so spectacular that the nation watched it on national TV.
Peter was the paramedic aboard the first rescue helicopter to reach survivors at the ill-fated 1998-1999 Sydney to Hobart yacht race where six sailors lost their lives. This has been described as one of the worst ocean racing disasters in history. Confronted by waves of 80 feet and wind gusts of 160 kph Peter was repeatedly winched down in these conditions to conduct what would be the most testing rescue of his career.
Twice coming close to death, Peter successfully rescued eight survivors on the stricken vessel Stand Aside. On that day Peter and his crew on Helimed One went far above and beyond the call of duty. As a result ‘Davo’, as well as pilot Peter Leigh and winch crewman David Sullivan, were recognised nationally and internationally, for their bravery, skill and dedication.
Since that time Peter has been on the speaking circuit, addressing business audiences, sales teams - in fact all sorts of teams – about his philosophy of goal-setting, teamwork, planning – and re-planning when your initial plans go wrong, as they did in the first 20 minutes of the rescue. The problem was that Peter simply couldn’t be pinpointed into the dingy where the crew members awaited rescue, one at a time. Plans had been made, and agreed upon on the way to the scene, but after 20 minutes of failure, as far as the helicopter crew were concerned, all their plans had gone wrong.
And so they set new plans and the rest is history.
Peter believes in living a balanced lifestyle, he believes in keeping himself in peak physical condition. From school, he has been involved in sport, and he has trained every day for as long as he can remember. In school it was cricket and football, later it became taikwondo and triathlons. This personal preparation saw him in peak condition when required to perform an extraordinary feat. Here’s what he told Time Management about his attitude to the biggest test of his life:

Sudden Planning

Lowell Tarling : Your job doesn’t let you make long term plans?

Davo: I can’t plan. One of the things I like about my job is that I don’t know what’s going to be thrown in my lap. It’s not like coming into work in the office every morning and knowing that you’re going to do all this typing and filing. I have to think about the job as I get it, hoping that I’m going to be able to handle the pressures that it’s going to throw up. I’ve got to deal with things as they come up and that’s the challenge. I can prepare to a certain point and then I just handle what’s dished up and hopefully I’m prepared enough. That’s actually a bit scary but that’s the challenge, to put yourself under that pressure. When I’m at a job I’m confronted with the actual challenges of hopefully helping the patient and keeping them alive. On the way back from any job all paramedics constantly ask themselves, ‘Did I do everything I could for this patient? Is there something more that I could have done?’ We criticise our own performance, and that’s the way we improve.

Fear and Self-Doubt

Lowell Tarling: How do you find that certainty within yourself?

Davo: In some of the jobs we get there is a certain amount of self-doubt. Normally as we’re flying to the job we can hear it all going off. We can hear the guys who are already at the scene in their cars saying things like, ‘We’ve got one person deceased, we’ve got two trapped patients, one’s a child…’ this all comes through the radio, and they’re saying, ‘How long is the helicopter going to be? Give us an ETA? (estimated time of arrival)’ so they’re screaming for the helicopter because that paramedic’s skills are needed immediately to help this person and we’re all individually thinking, ‘Gees, I hope I can handle this’. I try to keep those doubts out of my mind, I try to stay confident and stay cool, which only comes with experience. In my early days in the aircraft I couldn’t keep those doubts out of my mind. I would go to a scene and think, ‘I hope I can cope’. I tend to block those thoughts out now, having had years of experience on the machine. I just hope nothing foreign is going to be thrown up because there’s always that curly one and I think, ‘What am I going to do here?’ People can become trapped in cars in so many different ways – and sometimes we can’t do anything, we stand back and let the SES (State Emergency Service) team do their part.

Having A Go

Lowell Tarling: What cam you say about goal setting?

Davo: When the odds are against you and you feel negativity around you about achieving a certain goal, I’ve always been willing to have a go. If you don’t have a go, you’ll never know. I’ve been surprised at what I’ve achieved in my life because I’ve been prepared to have a go. I’ve got an enormous capacity to persevere with things whereas other people might give up because there’s too many barriers, too many hurdles, too many problems. I’ll keep chipping away, chipping away, until I can finally get there and do it. I always tend to take the hard road, a few weeks down the track someone says, ‘Why didn’t you do it like this?’ and I go – ‘I didn’t think of it like that’ because I achieved the goal anyway. Like a lot of things in life, I’ve attempted to do it the hard way, but I’ve always been willing to have a go and persevere and I think if the other people had that philosophy they’d achieve more and have more self esteem. As you improve, you increase your self-esteem, and you feel good about yourself. I feel good about myself when I achieve a goal.

Against The Odds

Lowell Tarling: The seas were up, the wind was dangerous, odds were against you and you almost gave up?

Davo: When the odds are against you and you’re wondering if you can do it, just keep persevering. Keep going because it’ll be that extra little inch that’ll get the greatest reward. I don’t mean putting the crew at risk, I wouldn’t do that, but (within limitations) you can work against the odds and still win. There’s risks involved in every job you do. We try and work them out, find out what they are, calculate them out, ‘Is it going to be too risky to do the job?’ If it is we won’t do it, we make alternative arrangements. We accept certain risks, others we don’t. Since this particular incident many people have asked me, ‘Was it your fitness that got you through?’ and in some respects I believe it was. I was very fit at that time and I think that had a big bearing on me being able to keep going. Ambos don’t HAVE to be in peak physical condition I’m just lucky that’s part of my persona, and it was luck I suppose that I was on that day. However I don’t think anything could have prepared us with what we were confronted with that day no matter how hard we trained. We had to swap ideas and rethink what we were going to do and just keep trying – have a go.

Stay Cool

Lowell Tarling: How do you cope in a crisis?

Davo: Have a bit of faith and confidence in your own ability to get the job done. I was frightened and I knew it was okay to feel frightened, I knew that I was dealing with lots of things out there that could possibly take my life. If you’re not frightened you haven’t got that respect for the risks that are there. I relied on my fitness to keep me going and keep me alive, and I was hoping my body would tell me when I’d had enough and it did. My brain was telling me to stop and my heart was telling me the opposite and I was fighting those two forces. I’m a very logical person – I still had this logical process in my mind saying, ‘Work it out, stay cool’. And with each wave and with each dunking and with each bashing against the raft and with each swinging of the helicopter, I just took each one of those as it was presented and thought, ‘Let’s get through this, get out, get another breath of air’. It was a one-step process all the way through and I just kept whittling the job down just like that until I finally got one guy – okay let’s do it like that again, then again, again, again, again, again, again – eight times.

I Love Training

Lowell Tarling: You obviously believe in training, as an ambo you constantly attend short courses and of course you kept on getting more and more qualifications, and now you are on a helicopter. Plus you physically train, every day.

Davo: Training has been a part of my life as far back as I can remember, right from my school age sport days I’ve just been a constant trainer. I’ve never been a natural at anything, I’ve always had to work hard to reach a goal and become good or average at it. Training is something I love doing whether it be riding the bike, swimming, running, lifting weights, the surf ski, anything like that. I train at almost anything depending on what sort of race or competition I’ve got coming up. In the ambulance service training is a constant something we have to do, we’re regularly out practicing water winch training, land winch training.

Mentors

Lowell Tarling: Who is your greatest mentor?

Davo: The person who had the biggest influence on my life was Ray Logan, my martial arts instructor. He doesn’t know that he did this, but he opened my eyes to becoming more a caring person. He made me see that it was okay to show that you care. I’ve seen him tell his children that he loved them. He’d hug his boys and kiss them, hug his dad and kiss him and I admired his openness – his shamelessness, yet he’s one of the toughest guys you would ever want to confront because if he wanted to he could beat you to a pulp. He’s been there for me since 1979 – he’s been there right throughout my ambulance career. He’s been there through all the major goals in my life, yes I believe in mentors.

Faith In Team and Ability

Lowell Tarling: How do you get through times of doubt?

Davo: In times of doubt you’ve got to have faith in your team. In the Sydney to Hobart, I had to have faith in the pilot to be able to hold me, I had to have faith in the winchman’s ability to not slam me around. One of the things in the back of my mind was, ‘We’re going to get killed if we get out here.’ And the pilot said, ‘I’m happy to give it a go’ and the winch crewman said the same thing. In actual fact they know that I’m scared – they don’t say it but they know. They’re thinking, ‘Peter’s going to be apprehensive about getting out’ so they’ve thrown light onto the situation but they’ve had faith in my ability to get out there and do the job – they’ve shown that by saying, ‘We’ll give this a go’. They knew that I was probably going to be exposed to the greater risk most of all, but they had faith in my ability to do it – I know they did. When they said, “Are you willing to have a go?’ I said, ‘If you’re confident, let’s try – see what happens’.

Adapting

Lowell Tarling: You talk a lot about adapting when plans go wrong? Is that because your initial plans failed?

Davo: Yes, we were failing, it wasn’t happening for us out there, we had to come up with some other plan because I was on the end of the hook and I didn’t know how much longer I could drown for before we had to give it away. At the 20 minute mark I felt myself being winched up and once I got up in the aircraft, I knew we either had to change our plan quickly and adopt something else otherwise it was going to be an absolute failure and these guys would perish. And that’s when I went with this idea, ‘Just dump me back in the water and let out more cable and we’ll see what happens.’ That’s what we did. And it worked. I think that’s a huge message in itself, if it doesn’t work – try something else. It sprung into my head because I’d almost made it at one stage but I didn’t have enough cable and I thought, ‘If I’d had enough cable then I would have reached that life raft’.

Teamwork

Lowell Tarling: How important is teamwork?

Davo: I cannot do my job without the rest of the guys. It’s not an individual occupation in any sense because it takes the three of us to pull the whole job off. The pilot sometimes has got to do some very skilful flying to get me into tight landing positions, flying through bad weather and those sorts of things. Then there’s the prospect of not being able to land, where the winchman has to winch me in, then once I’m on the ground, as the paramedic, it’s my turn to treat the patient. It takes all three to get the patient to a hospital. Then we hand over to another team – at the hospital, so in this job you cannot be an individual. It is a team effort, there’s no other way of looking at it. I don’t think the general public recognises that. Any job that’s successful, the compliments must go across the board, spread out, equally shared. Everyone is working for that end goal, that is to get to that patient, help them as much as we can and get them to a hospital that can offer more care. Everything’s a team decision, it’s a team decision to do the job and then we make a decision on how we’re actually going to do it. It all revolves around teamwork.

Dedication

Lowell Tarling: How important is ‘character’?

Davo: Very important. I’m that person that stays dedicated. I’m a loyal person – I’m loyal to my work, my boss. I hate letting anybody down. My word is my bond and I stick by that, if I say I’m going to do something I’ll do it, and I’ll never forget that I’ve said that. If I say I’ll do it, I’ll damn well do it, I know I will. I won’t let you down.

How Far Are You Prepared To Go?

Lowell Tarling: You could easily have died out there? Did you analyse the risks V the gain?

Davo: I look at all the aspects of the thing, like ‘What am I hoping to achieve? What could go wrong? If it doesn’t work out, what’s the worst consequence that can happen? Am I prepared to accept that worst consequence?’ That’s what I weigh up – especially with big decisions. And if I’m prepared to put up with the worst consequences – whatever they are – then I’ll accept the task and do the job. That Sydney to Hobart job was a real mind game, I was constantly talking to myself, ‘Come on Peter, you can do it, you can do it, there’s no one else for these people’ and the other part of me was going, ‘No you dickhead, stop’. So it was a mind game at times. I’m usually prepared to push myself a long way - and I don’t mean to a gung ho level. But I’m like that with anything I undertake. I remember sitting around with some work mates. I was teaching these guys martial arts, we were babbling a bit, and they said, ‘What makes you get the courage to get out on the sparing floor to face all these people?’ And I said, ‘Well…you’ve got to be prepared to die’. What I meant was, you’ve got to be prepared to take the ultimate consequences of what you do. I didn’t mean you get out there and literally die. And they’ve never let me forget this, ‘You’ve got to be prepared to die…’ comments slip out every now and think, ‘Why did I ever say that?’

A Feeling Of Elation

Lowell Tarling: What kept you going against the odds?

Davo: Getting the first guy gave me confidence and a feeling of elation. I’ve never felt it before this rescue and I’ve never felt it since, it’s just a feeling that I couldn’t be conquered for that moment. It was an enormous feeling of elation. Meeting the survivors was just the ultimate. Nothing could beat that. To turn up there, meet these guys and develop friendships that are going to last now forever, I know they will.

Public Speaking

Lowell Tarling: Since then you’ve addressed many corporate audiences, in your Ambo uniform, and you’ve told them about your work?

Davo: I never thought I’d be up there in front of the crowds. I’d much rather be back on the winch in the Sydney to Hobart than talk. I get very nervous but I love it when I’m up there, it’s just the build-up into it that I don’t enjoy. I feel much more comfortable on the winch than standing in front of two hundred or 800 people and doing a talk.