Australian surfer Jensen Kirby suffers burns to 13 per cent of his body in boat blast in Indonesia

WARNING: GRAPHIC IMAGES

A WA surfer has suffered serious burns to 13 per cent of his body, including his face, in a boat fire blast while chasing waves on a solo trip overseas.

Jensen Kirby, 19, had spent the week in the Telo islands, a tropical paradise off the west coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, when on August 11 he hopped on a boat heading out to a break for an afternoon surf.

But he was soon at the centre of a medical emergency after he was engulfed in a huge ball of flames when a mishandled boat battery ignited petrol fumes.

“(The mechanic) put the negative to the positive and the positive to the negative. As soon as it touched, the battery exploded and sparked big flames around me,” Kirby told 7NEWS.com.au.

Kirby, who sustained burns to his face, chest, arms, hands and legs, turned to the water and jumped in.

After a few moments he tried to get to get out to assess the situation, unclear if the boat would explode again, but was overcome with pain, his whole body burning.

He dived back into the water but hit the sand, peeling all the burnt skin from his leg.

Kirby, from Perth, eventually made it to a shower where he spent 15 minutes running cool water over the wounds, calling his mum back home in WA and telling her “don’t freak out, the boat just exploded and I’m burnt”.

After coming out of the shower, he lathered himself in all the burn cream he could find.

But he was stung by searing pain again as he waded through the warm ocean water to another boat that would take him to help.

As he sat on the vessel, looking at the mechanic who was burnt but appeared by chance to have escaped the worst of the blast, he admitted he was worried for his future.

“Am I going to live? Am I going to live but not be able to surf again? Am I going to have to get an amputation ... because of an infection? And then I also had a thought of, am I going to die? It’s a crazy, crazy thing to experience,” he said.

After 45 minutes, where at points he stopped himself from passing out with deep breaths, they reached land and he was taken on a scooter via a bumpy road to a medical outpost.

The centre did not have much but he was given some tablets and his wounds were dressed with gauze and cream.

He slept there that night, waking to blisters all over his body.

In a piece of luck, he managed to secure a plane ticket to Padang and then to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia where he reunited with his “legend” mum who had dropped everything to be with her eldest child.

He then spent the night in hospital at a cost of $5,000.

He believes travel insurance will cover that but without his mum, who was asked to fork out a $10,000 deposit, it is unlikely he would have been able to receive important treatment at the private clinic.

The pair were desperate to get home to Perth so after one night, he was bandaged up, given some painkillers and soon on a flight to WA.

Back on home soil, Kirby spent three days in Fiona Stanley Hospital but fortunately avoided infection and did not need surgery or skin grafts.

“My face was fully peeling. I was really scared to look at my face and when I did I looked like I had aged 30 years,” he said, thankful he is now healing well.

He wants to return to the water as soon as possible but is grateful the freak accident did not cost him his life.

Time will tell what sort of scars remain but Kirby, who had been surfing near where fellow West Australian dad Jeremy Wann was killed in a surfing accident earlier this month, said he was “very lucky in an unlucky moment”.

“Anything could have happened, there could have been more petrol, a larger blast and shrapnel,” he said.

“I’m lucky I didn’t inhale any of the flames or burn my eyes”.

The surfer, who has travelled to Fiji, the Maldives, Europe and Indonesia in the hunt for waves, will have to be extra sunsmart for the next two years but has more trips on the horizon.