News

Media boat sinks at Olympic rowing shoot

From the New Zealand Herald
With the boat she was on sinking and the water up to her knees and rising fast, all Sarah Ivey could think about was keeping her expensive camera gear dry.

The 24-year-old Herald photographer was on a media boat carrying seven newspaper and television journalists that sank at a farewell for New Zealand’s Olympic rowers at a choppy Lake Karapiro yesterday afternoon.

“There was just water gushing in over the front like something out of Titanic and all of a sudden I was up to my knees in it,” she said.

“People were screaming and freaking out but I wasn’t worried I was going to get wet – I was just thinking, ‘Oh my god, I’m going to lose all my gear’. Everyone was screaming and swearing … but mostly everyone was shouting, ‘Oh hell, I’ve lost my lens’ or ‘Oh hell, I’ve got to get my camera out of the water’.”

No one was seriously injured in the incident, despite the lake’s freezing temperatures in the midst of the southern hemisphere winter, but Ivey lost around NZ$50,000-worth of camera equipment; another photographer lost their equipment, and two TV cameras are now at the bottom of the lake.

Read the NZ Herald report here

See a video report of the incident by clicking here


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