The sun had barely been up an hour when Gus Hutt reached the shoreline of Matata Beach, which borders the Bay of Plenty on the northern coast of New Zealand, at around 7:15 am on October 26. He was there to check his fishing lines, he later explained and said he noticed something floating in the water.
He reached in and pulled out what looked like a doll. Then the doll squeaked. “Oh god, this is a baby and it’s alive,” Hutt recalled to the Whakatane Beacon. The baby, he described, seemed so still and his face looked “porcelain”.
Not knowing who the baby belonged to, Hutt said his wife Sue immediately ran over to the nearby Murphy’s Holiday camp and informed the park manager. The manager directed them to the only family they knew who had come with a baby.
“She ran to the tent and just shook it and asked, ‘Where’s your baby — we just pulled one from the sea’ and the mother just screamed,” Hutt told Stuff, a local news website.
The news came as a sick joke to Jessica Whyte, the baby’s mother, who said she was awakened at 7:30 a.m. by the camp manager. “It was horrible in between hearing that and seeing him,” she said. “I don’t think my heart (beat) from hearing that to seeing him. I don’t think my heart worked.”
The 18-month-old baby, named Malachi, appeared cold, purple, and smaller than usual when the parents met him at the park’s reception. But “he was breathing, he was alive,” said Whyte, according to the Telegraph, adding that she gave him a “big hug”.
Malachi usually wakes at 8 a.m., according to Whyte, but the sound of the nearby waves could be why he had risen early. She said that he had tried to run into the sea on the previous day but had been stopped by his parents.
