Rob Hamill wasn’t supposed to be in the water that day. Although he was tempted by the gentle cyan waves in the remote Thai anchorage, doctors had removed a carbuncle from his neck a few days prior and ordered him to stand down.
Kerry Hamill
But his three sons – Finn, Declan and Ivan – were knocking about in Ko Roc’s clear water, free-diving to impressive depths, pushing each other to new limits and generally giving each other the piss. The constant energy radiating between them was equal parts competition and camaraderie.
Rob Hamill
Finn was squeezing the last drops of adventure – along with some precious family time – out of his too-short visit before returning to New Zealand to continue his training for the Olympic rowing team. The 21-year-old carried the same competitive spirit as his dad and was keen to match 16-year-old Ivan’s 30m free-dive. Rob, unable to resist the fun, fitted on his mask and slipped off the stern of the family’s longtime home, Javelot.
Rob Hamill, single scull 1996
The 43-foot Fountaine Pajot was anchored on the edge of a deep drop-off in the remote southern Thailand marine preserve and the boys used dive weights attached to the end of a 23m line to guide them down into the depths. Close in age and interests, they had grown up aboard Javelot. Rowdy contests, shared adventures and lots of laughter were common in the tight-knit family.
Kerry, Gail and Foxy Lady
Rob dove under with the boys, watched Finn swim down and spotted Declan kicking off the sea bottom six metres down, his deepest dive yet. When Declan surfaced, he was gasping for air, dazed from the lack of oxygen. Rob surfaced and took a close look at him as Ivan held him in the water, waiting for him to recover. Finn should have been right behind. Suddenly, Rob realized Finn hadn’t surfaced. Jabbing his head under, he saw what no parent ever wants to see –Finn floating lifeless, arms spread wide like a starfish, sinking down into the deep blue water.
“He’s gone! Finn’s gone!” Rob called out to Declan, Ivan and his wife, Rachel.
World Champs silver, 1994
Finn had blacked out on his ascent and was drifting down toward the deepwater drop-off. Rob dove after him and, working together with Declan and Ivan, pushed and dragged him to the surface. Declan clamped Finn’s jaw shut on the ascent to prevent him from taking in more water and began mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on the surface. Standing on the transom, Rachel, overwhelmed by the sight of Finn’s limp body, began screaming.
Rob and Phil Stubbs, Kiwi Challenge 1997
As his brothers helped swim him toward the boat, Finn regained consciousness, but the nightmare wasn’t over. Back on board, his condition worsened and he struggled with shallow, painful breaths and a racing heartbeat. Concerned about secondary drowning, inflammation and pulmonary oedema caused by water in the lungs, Rob put out a Pan Pan and a request for oxygen on the VHF while Rachel and Finn went ashore in the dinghy to see if they could find help. Thai park rangers arranged for a medical boat to respond, which brought oxygen to the boat and Finn to the mainland and then on to Ko Lanta hospital, where he was assessed and transferred to another major hospital two hours away. He developed pneumonia due to water in his lungs and spent three days in the hospital.
Declan, Rachel, Ivan and Finn, Tonga 2015
Looking back, Rob says they felt lucky they had recently seen the free-diving movie The Deepest Breath and had initiated recovery techniques for a water blackout but, he says, they should have been more prepared. They all hope to learn from the terrifying accident. He is haunted by the sight of Finn’s body floating down, back-lit by the sunlight penetrating into the deep water. But it is Finn’s reaction that really tears into him.
“If Dad hadn’t spotted me, I might have sunk back down, too deep to be recovered,” Finn says. “For Dad, he’s lost two brothers. Imagine what it would be like to lose a son.”
Finn, shallow water blackout
“We nearly lost our boy,” Rob said. “How easily life can be lost.”
The Killing FieldsRob’s brother, Kerry, had always had an adventurous spirit. He lived aboard and sailed his 28-foot sailboat Foxy Lady from Darwin, Australia, to Southeast Asia in the mid-1970s. Communications were limited in those days and Rob remembers his family in New Zealand gathered around the kitchen table reading Kerry’s letters home and living vicariously. In June of 1978, the young sailor dropped his girlfriend off in Singapore and he and Canadian Stuart Glass and Briton John Dewhirst set sail. A storm blew Foxy Lady off course and into Cambodian waters where the sailors took refuge behind Koh Tang, an island about 50km offshore, not knowing the area was a Khmer Rouge naval base. Armed men approached the boat and open fire, killing Stuart. Kerry and John were captured by the Khmer Rouge, accused of being CIA spies, imprisoned, tortured, forced to make false confessions and murdered. Kerry was 27.
Javelot from above
Back at the Hamill family home in New Zealand, the letters stopped. No one knew what had happened to Kerry. Painful splinters worked their way through what had previously been
a happy family. Rob’s mom, Esther, took to staring out at the sea and saying, “It’s OK, he’ll turn up at Christmas.” But Christmas came and went without word. In January of 1980, after 16 months of painful silence, a distraught neighbour told them to buy a local newspaper.
Rob remembers driving to the store with his brother, John, and seeing the headlines: Whakatane yachtsman Kerry Hamill captured and executed by the Khmer Rouge. The tragedy tore the close-knit family apart. John, who had been closest to Kerry in age and his good friend, became increasingly aggravated and violent. Eight months later, he walked up a cliff and threw himself off. Rob’s father, Miles, and Rob’s brother, Peter, found John’s lifeless body on the rocks below.
No Place for Grief
For Rob, the seed of sailing the world had been planted during his teenage years, when he lived through the letters Kerry sent home. During the dark years that followed Kerry’s murder, he suppressed his grief and channelled his energy into rowing for New Zealand. His success at winning silver at the 1994 World Rowing Championships and lining up at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics led to competing in – and winning – the first two-man, trans-Atlantic rowing race, in 1997. After the tragic death of his rowing partner, Phil Stubbs, in a plane crash, he wrote The Naked Rower, a memoir recounting the challenges and triumphs they faced during the race. He married, started a family, and took a run at New Zealand politics. But the grief over Kerry’s death and the subsequent destruction of the family had never healed.
“There was no place for grief in the 1970s,” Rob says. “No place to put it. It was never discussed, never processed. It was difficult for family members to talk about it openly.
Volcanic eruption and Tanna Island, Vanuatu
“While I was rowing across the Atlantic, Phil and I would take turns at the oars, two hours on, two hours off. When
I was off, I would climb into the tiny, suffocating cabin on our (seven-metre craft). It was like a coffin. All of the physical and mental exhaustion allowed my grief to surface to the point where I silently wept. It was almost a daily occurrence; I couldn’t stop the grieving. With the isolation, the self-inflicted pain and torture from rowing 12 hours
a day, and separation from my family, I thought about Kerry and his prison cell. About my beautiful brother. I knew I needed to do something, take some action, to honour his memory, and John’s, and deal with the grief.”
The grief was desperate and acute, he realised, and he knew he would never heal. “I knew I had to go to Cambodia.”
In August of 2009, 30 years after the Cambodian revolution, Rob travelled to Cambodia to testify against Commander Kaing Guek Eav, known as Comrade Duch. After three decades of impunity, Duch and other senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge were called to stand trial for Crimes Against Humanity, homicide and torture in the Extraordinary Chamber in the Courts of Cambodia. The United Nations-backed trials were part of the war crimes tribunal process, and Rob was invited to give a victim’s statement.
Rob Hamill at Tuol Sleng
In 1975, under the leadership of dictator Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge seized control of Cambodia. Pol Pot referred to himself as Brother Number One. The brutal regime was responsible for the deaths of more than two million people, a genocide that killed a quarter of the country’s population. Comrade Duch controlled the Tuol Sleng prison, or S21, in Phnom Penh, where Kerry was held. S21 had been a former secondary school; during the revolution, classrooms were converted to jail cells and torture chambers. More than 14,000 prisoners were executed in S21. Bodies were burned or buried in mass graves in sites known today as The Killing Fields. Vietnam’s 1979 invasion of Cambodia ended the Khmer Rouge’s reign, but Pol Pot remained a free man until his house arrest just prior to his death in 1998.
Rob’s long road to Cambodia and his testimony at the trial are captured in the intense 2012 documentary, Brother Number One.
During his testimony, Rob acknowledged the pain of the Cambodian people and their immense loss. While on the stand, Rob confronted Duch and described the Hamill family he had destroyed.
“When you killed my brother Kerry, you also killed my brother John,” Rob said as he looked directly at Duch. “The effect of these devastating losses on our family simply cannot be measured. They were massive and incomprehensible.”
The Hamill family had been destroyed, “along with Kerry at S21,” he said.
In July 2010, Duch was sentenced to 35 years in prison, which was reduced to 19 years for time spent in detention. Duch died in prison in 2020.
“People talk of closure, but grief is an ongoing process,” Rob said. “There is no closure. There is only grief.”
testifying at the ECCC War Crimes Court, 2009
In his wake Back in New Zealand, as their young sons grew, Rob and Rachel searched for ways to keep the family close. They bought Javelot in 2014 and planned a cruise from New Zealand to Tonga. After 10 months of preparations and a couple of shakedown cruises, they set sail for the South Pacific when the boys were 13, 11 and 8. The notoriously difficult crossing from the Bay of Islands to Tonga was rough, but they learned a lot. The return passage south to New Zealand was another beating, but the family came together and decided the live-aboard life was indeed for them.
“We left New Zealand (after that trip) with the loose intention to retrace Kerry’s footsteps in Southeast Asia, and a wider dream of circumnavigating,” Rob said. They started The Cruising Kiwi YouTube channel in 2018 and built a loyal following. They hadn’t meant to sail to Darwin – where Kerry’s trail started – but thought they might pick up his trail in Indonesia. When Covid arrived in 2020, they stayed in Australian waters and circumnavigated the country.
That trail ended in Darwin, where they picked up Kerry’s trail and followed his journeys through Asia. With Kerry often in their thoughts, they weighed returning to Cambodia.
“They talk about grief being passed through the generations. I don’t want to have my grief carried subliminally by my family,” Rob said. “I want to talk about it openly, allow my boys to ask questions.”
The Hamills made a decision to fly to Cambodia from their cruising base in Thailand and visit the S21 prison as a family.
“When I came to the prison, I was in tears before I even walked in the door,” Rachel said.
“They tell you what happened here and you just go numb.
You can’t fathom the horrors people did to other people, what they did to their neighbours and relatives.”
The younger Hamill brothers, 2021
She was amazed at the boys’ strength during the visit. Each one went at his own pace, on his own, and processed it in his own way, she said.
“The Killing Fields was difficult to see…The guards, killing children, babies. How did they do that night after night?”
The visceral rawness of the thing had never been brought to the front, for his boys, Rob said. They were glad they went, that they chose to walk through the prison and see that this history is real, and try to process it.
When they were leaving the Killing Fields, they met a Cambodian man who, through a translator, let them know he was a survivor.
“The prison is a numbing experience. To meet someone who survived, pointing to photos, who says, ‘this is my uncle, this is my brother, my son,’ someone who went through it… there was such an emotional, physical response from us when we met him.”
Rob and the man shared a few powerful stories, a few laughs, and some tears. Rachel and Finn were standing nearby facing the street when a truck with the words ‘Kerry Express’ painted on the side of it drove past. ‘We were gobsmacked,” Rachel said.
Finn, Declan, Rob, Rachel and Ivan at Angkor Wat, Cambodia
Once the Hamills left the Killing Fields and were in the tuk-tuk open taxi working their way slowly away from the prison and through the streets of Phnom Penh, emotions overcame Finn and he began to cry. The family embraced him and all of them wept.
“Thinking back, when we nearly lost Finn in the free-diving accident,” Rob said. “He had the wherewithal to understand grief, to say, ‘If I’d lost my life, like Dad lost his brother, my brothers are going to suffer the same sort of grief.’ That is such
a beautiful awareness, to have that kind of understanding is really lovely. Really lovely.” The thought of it makes him proud.
After crossing the Indian Ocean via the Maldives, Rob, Rachel and Ivan are currently sailing in the Seychelles with an eye on Tanzania, Madagascar and South Africa. Finn splits his time on the boat with his continued training in New Zealand as a semi-
professional athlete and Declan is spending part of the year working in Australia. Friends and family join them when they can.
If Kerry was alive John would be alive, too,” Rob says. “I often think of them and how it would be if they could have joined us on this adventure.”
“We keep the box of Kerry’s letters onboard” Rachel said. “In a way, we feel we have him with us, too.”
Words by Theresa Nicholson, Photo Credit: Rob Hamill
