SYDNEY 2005-01-01 08:33--Mother of two, Jillian Searle, had to choose between her children when she made a life-or-death decision. Swept up by mountainous tsunami   waves at a Thai resort ( ), she could not hold on to both her young sons and survive . Fighting to stay above the waters , she had to choose which one would have to take his chances in the swirling torrent  . "I knew I had to let go of one of them and I just thought I'd better let go of the one that's the older," she told Sky News television in a report broadcast on Thursday. She said she was accompanied by the two boys, Lachie, 5, and two-year-old Blake, and their father, Brad, who had watched the drama helplessly from their first-floor hotel room, when the waves struck. "And I was screaming, trying to find _ , and we thought he was dead," she told reporters on arrival back in Australia. Lachie was found alive about 2 hours later clinging to a door and, looked uninjured as his mother spoke to reporters. British surfer   Martin Markwell is also a lucky man. He had always dreamed of catching that perfect wave -but when it finally came along, it was a nightmare. He was on his surfboard when he was swept up by a tsunami wave. "It was really terrible because I was surfing, I was really surfing on a wave I wasn't supposed to be on," he said. "As an experienced surfer, when I saw the wave come I realized something was wrong, but I couldn't escape because my surfboard was tied to my ankle." His wife Vicki and son Jake looked on in horror from a hotel balcony as he crashed towards the shore. Luckily , he stayed on top of his board until he reached the hotel , jumped off and got to safety as the ocean rolled back to feed a much larger tsunami wave on its way . The family regrouped and ran to safety just minutes before a giant tsunami wave 10 meters high. When the waves struck, the father Brad  _  .
reported the disaster to Sky News television was watching a drama play on TV in the hotel tried to find his son lost in the waters watched things going on , unable to do anything