Lydia Frere and her golden retriever Archie, who likely saved her life after she got stuck in a stream. Photo: Vanessa Laurie / Stuff
It took Lydia Frere a few days of safety at home to realise that Archie, her 4-year-old golden retriever, had probably saved her life.
Stuck in waist-high water in a freezing stream with night falling, her mind desperately churned through the options of what she could do, all the while still hardly believing how a walk with her two dogs, Archie and Blue, had turned so bad so quickly.
"I thought, 'I am going to take a chance', and I called Archie," she says. "I didn't tell him what to fetch. I just said, 'Can you fetch it?'
"And he did. He turned around and got my jacket."
In that jacket she had left on the stream bank was her phone, and with that phone she called the police who were able to rescue her from the water, pulling her out after finding her suffering what was almost certainly the early stages of hypothermia.
"Oh my gosh - I can't tell you how grateful I am to the police," she says nearly two weeks later at her New Plymouth home.
She is also grateful to Archie, who has been getting more than his fair share of treats and cuddles since the rescue set in motion by his fetching skills.
Even now, Frere can hardly believe a simple walk with her two golden retrievers nearly ended in tragedy.
The Timaru Stream near Ōakura in Taranaki has been a favourite walking spot for years. Her dogs love playing in the water at the mouth of the stream, and she loves the beach.
On Saturday, 3 August, the weather was picture perfect when she set out for the walk just after 4pm.
But at that time, a larger dog was already at the stream mouth. Wanting to avoid potential trouble with her own two, Frere decided to walk upstream.
The Timaru Stream near Ōakura. Photo: Vanessa Laurie / Stuff
Though designated a stream, the waterway is similar in size to some rivers in Taranaki. Starting in the Pouakai Range, it picks up more and more water as it snakes its way through farmland to the sea.
Near the mouth, its banks are grass-covered mud, the water is dark even in the sunlight, and the stream bed is covered in barely visible sunken logs. It is, Frere says, an uninviting stretch of water.
Just minutes after diverting left, away from the mouth, Blue misjudged the grassy bank and fell into that dark, slow-moving water.
Despite being a retriever, Blue does not swim. Once he had found safety on a mud mound in the water, he stayed there, unwilling to swim to a spot he could get out from.
After spending more than half an hour trying everything she could think of to get him, Frere reluctantly realised she had to get in and heave the 45kg dog out. Blue had started to panic. He was shaking with cold and whining.
Though the day had been sunny and clear, it was cold. The temperature had reached a high of 14C but the overnight low of 3.8C was one of the coldest of the previous three weeks.
After taking off her coat and throwing it onto the bank to stop it from getting wet, Frere slid backwards on her stomach, feet first into the water.
"But as I slid down, I knew I was not getting out."
Despite that, Frere stayed calm. She even managed to get Blue out.
Blue, left, and Archie are only a few months apart in age. Photo: Vanessa Laurie / Stuff
But as the sunlight faded behind the hills and the already chilly temperature plunged, she knew she was in trouble.
Even though the water was only knee deep, the stream had carved out the mud under the banks.
There was nothing for her feet to stand on that would allow her to push herself up to the shoulder-high bank. At the same time, there was nothing she could get a good enough grip on to pull herself up.
"I was in there for an hour. And you know that feeling when you were a kid running down that dark passage and it feels like there is something behind you? That's what it was like for me. It felt like there was something coming for me in the water."
On top of that, Frere felt embarrassed. She was stuck in a stream, an arm's length from the bank.
In running shoes and jeans, with the tide coming in, she did not dare attempt to swim downstream. Everything in her body was telling her not to, she says.
She did not know what was under the water and if she would get snagged. Neither did she want to risk getting totally wet, making her dangerous situation even worse.
So she waited, calling for help and waving at a car in the distance. No-one saw or heard her.
The stream is similar in size to some Taranaki rivers. Photo: Vanessa Laurie / Stuff
"I kept thinking, 'I am just going to hold on [until] the morning'. I had stopped shivering by then."
It was only as it started to get pitch black that she remembered the jacket and the phone in its pocket. She still can't believe it took her that long to think of asking Archie to fetch it.
Then, when the triumph of getting the phone seemed like an answer to her prayers, there was despair.
Reluctant to believe she was in serious trouble, her first call was to her 22-year-old son, Dylan.
But he couldn't hear her properly and she wasn't sure if he could figure out what she was talking about.
With just 10 percent battery power left on her phone, she made the decision to hang up and call 111. It was 5.43pm. The sun had set seven minutes beforehand and the temperature was falling fast.
Throughout this process, Frere remained calm, she says. Even though she had been shivering, she couldn't remember being cold.
The 111 operator was able to quickly and efficiently figure out where she was, what she was wearing, the level of danger she was in and that the tide was rising. While it had been up to her knees when she got in, the water was now at her waist.
"That was when I completely lost it. Also it was dark. I thought, 'it's feeding time in the water'," Frere says, still embarrassed by her fears.
By that time, help was just minutes away. The operator hung up to preserve her phone battery, calling back twice to tell Frere her rescuers had pinged her phone and knew they were close to her.
"He said, 'Lydia, you need to start shouting out now.' And then there were three police officers there with a torch."
A day out walking Blue and Archie turned into a near-death experience for Lydia Frere. Photo: Vanessa Laurie / Stuff
At 6.06pm they hauled her out of the frigid water.
At her home 12 days later, Frere, who works in digital transformation and information management, says she still feels like an "idiot" that she had needed to be rescued.
Even as she was pulled out, she was apologising for causing a fuss, insisting she wasn't cold and could drive herself home, that she was absolutely fine.
She wasn't. Her rescuers wrapped her in blankets and stuck her in a hot car so she could warm up. They reassured her she had done the right thing, first in staying put and second in calling for help, even if she was embarrassed she needed it.
It helped her to feel better about the situation, and as she warmed up she began to feel how cold she really was.
By the time she walked through her door at home, she was shivering violently. A week later, she was diagnosed with a hypothermia-induced kidney infection.
It was only in conversations with her friends days later that she began to realise how close she had come to tragedy.
How she could have died standing in a stream in the mud on a Saturday night. That it was only her dog thinking he was playing a game of fetch that got her to safety.
"What I can't get out of my head is what would I have done if I couldn't have got to my phone," she says.
"I try and blank it out because I really don't know what I would have done."
This story was originally published by Stuff.