Christchurch man Ross Humphries was on his yacht in Lyttelton harbour when Tuesday's deadly earthquake struck and was one of scores of people who trekked over the Bridle Path between the devastated city and the crushed port of Lyttelton searching for family and loved ones.
At 12.51pm on Tuesday, Mr Humphries was near the epicentre of the 6.3 magnitude quake on his yacht Astra with friend Seaton Workman, at Parau Bay in Lyttelton Harbour.
"It was like sledgehammers beating the hull ... it was like we had run aground and were being jackhammered. It was a strange sensation running out on deck," he said.
The pair motored the Astra to Lyttelton to check on a friend, who was uninjured but whose house was in disarray, and Mr Workman returned to the well-provisioned yacht where he remained overnight.
The phone network was down and the Lyttelton tunnel and Evans Pass road were closed.
About 4pm, unable to contact his family, Mr Humphries set out on foot for Christchurch suburb Bryndwr, where his wife Angela Meyer and their 19-month-oldson Dashkin were staying athis mother's house.
Part of a loose convoy of about 20 Christchurch-bound walkers, Mr Humphries said he saw about 50 people headed back towards Lyttelton on the Bridle Path.
Arriving at the foot of the Christchurch Gondola, he got a lift to Ferrymead bridge, which was severely damaged and fit only for foot passage.
From there he hitched a ride down a "completely liquefied" Ferry Rd where a car was "buried on an angle of 45 degrees up to the driver's side door - cars everywhere were sunk up to their axles in mud".
Hitching another ride to AMI Stadium he then went to his former wife's house in Philipstown to help put a tarpaulin over her chimney, which had collapsed through the roof.
About 7.30pm his former wife drove him on a "circuitous route", skirting the broken and cordoned city, to his mother's house.
"It was a strange scene as I went into the city - surreal, very quiet except for the sound of helicopters. I saw people walking, seemingly aimlessly with sort of a quite blank expression on their faces. It was quite unnerving."
Once reunited with his infant son and wife in Bryndwr, Mr Humphries was "overjoyed to see that they were OK".
