Australian surfers Steph Weisse, Elliot Foote, Will Teagle and Jordan Short start journey home

Nias, Indonesia: After the misadventure of a lifetime, Elliot Foote, Steph Weisse, Jordan Short and Will Teagle are on their way back home.

Rescued at sea in Indonesia’s Banyak Islands this week, the four Australians and the rest of their party of 12 holidaying friends left their private surf retreat on Friday, sailing to Nias, the largest island off the west coast of Sumatra, on the catamaran of an Australian skipper, Grant Richardson.

Greeted by Australian embassy officials and the Indonesian National Search and Rescue Agency, Basarnas, they were whisked straight off to the airport, where they arrived just in time to catch the last flight of the day to Medan on Sumatra.

From there, the group was expected to catch a connecting service to Jakarta and onwards to Sydney to be reunited with their families.

It was from Nias that they had departed in two boats on Sunday for the three to four-hour journey to remote Pinang Island, only to strike a storm which turned their trip to celebrate Foote’s 30th birthday upside down.

While one of the two wooden longboats took shelter on an island en route to their destination, the other began to capsize, forcing Foote, Weisse, Short, Teagle and three Indonesian crew into the ocean with their surfboards and whatever else they could grab.

The Australians survived 36 hours stranded at sea before being discovered in a search effort involving local rescue crews, the military and police, fishermen and other volunteers such as Richardson, who played a central role in the operation, scouring the water of the Banyaks around the clock.

Foote earlier told Nine’s Today program in an interview from Pinang Island of his experience being separated from the others on his surfboard.