Missing man found ‘clinging to a tree in raging waters’ in Vaal River

Posted by Anita Froneman on 5 January 2022

After search parties including SAPS and the NSRI were out searching for wildlife conservationist Dirk Engelbrecht along the Vaal River for over 24 hours, he has been found safe.

READ: Conservationist goes missing while helping birds along Vaal River

One of the teams who assisted in the rescue mission, the Owl Rescue Centre, shared the ordeal:

‘All smiles after an awfully tough 24 hours. Dirk from Wild Serve, myself, Danelle and our daughter Rebecca were helping out rescuing baby Egrets and Herons that were being washed away out of their nests with the increasing water level of the Vaal River.

We’d finished up in one section with all the babies loaded into crates, with Judy, Vaughan and staff from South African Wildlife Rehabilitation Center stabilizing and transporting through to rehab.

Dirk and I then decided that we would drive 10 km up river and travel down via kayak back to base to check all the islands for more fledglings.

We were making good progress, the river was rather pleasant until we came around a corner that we subsequently found the locals refer to as Hell’s Corner, and that’s on a normal day, not when the water level is four metres higher in flood.

Danelle, Rebecca and I were on one kayak and Dirk on his own. Hell’s Corner lived up to his name but with a lot of scary luck we managed to navigate through but we did lose sight of Dirk.

Then a few hundred meters further we reached the next bend, Hell’s Corner³, Danelle looked back at me and we knew we had to make it to the river bank as the rapids were nothing we’d ever encountered and there was no possible way of us getting through.

We almost reached the bank, but with all our luck used up on that first corner, we ironically hit a barb wire fence just protruding the water surface. The fence swung the kayak 180⁰ and we hit the beginning of the white water backwards with us immediately capsizing. Initially we held onto the kayak but realized this wasn’t going to end well and we decided to rather let go and swim for the bank.

We lost all our gear, phones and our GoPro camera. But we were safe. After walking a few kilometres a local farmer gave us a lift back to base. Worryingly Dirk wasn’t there.

We took a drive back to see if we could find him along the road as we were adamant he also wouldn’t have attempted those rapids. But we couldn’t find him. An hour later we had NSRI on the river in their Jet Ski looking plus many local residents. That was at 3pm, by midnight we had volunteers from far and wide helping us on the search, but nothing.

By 6 o’clock this morning panic was starting to set in and family, friends and rescue staff were all out hoping for good news. The police chopper was flying up and down and NSRI were back on the water. At 9am the call came through that they had found Dirk clinging to a tree in raging waters. After landing safely onshore, Dirk joked that he was good to hug that tree for five days but not a second more.’

Picture: Owl Rescue Centre






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