A local gardener has spoken of the moment he helped save the life of a man and his dog who were swept into the stormy sea at Mullion by a giant wave.

Andrew ‘Roo’ Hunt, alongside holidaymaker Robert ‘Yogi’ Young from Poole, managed to drag him from the icy water of Mullion Harbour using a life ring.

The unnamed man, who has been described by witnesses as a "local man from Mullion," was described as "exhausted, battered but safe" following the ordeal last Wednesday evening, during the height of Storm Eleanor.

His terrier dog also survived, despite being washed out into the harbour up to four times and at one point being lost in a waste pipe, before being pulled in on top of an old fishing net.

The happy ending could have been very different, however, had it not been for the quick-thinking actions of Roo and his fellow rescuer.

Speaking to the Helston Packet, Roo, from nearby Ruan Major, said: “It was really quite frightening. You don’t realise what the water takes out of you.”

It was actually his girlfriend, Karen Ellis, who saw the man out the back of the car as they were about to leave.

“She said, ‘There’s a man walking down the pier.’ I said, ‘No, he can’t be,’ but we got out just to check and see. Because of the view being blocked, where he was walking down you can’t see the waves coming in – I think he thought it was just another day.”

They watched as the first wave hit, which the man managed to avoid. He began to make his way back along the pier, but the second wave was already hitting.

“I thought he should be alright, but once the spray had gone we noticed he wasn’t standing on the wall anymore,” said Roo.

He raced down to the beach, calling 999 as he ran, fearing the man was going to be swept right out to sea.

Holidaymaker Yogi had already thrown the man a life ring – something Roo believes made all the difference, at it stopped the man from being taken out further.

“I think if he hadn’t got that at that point and had gone around the corner, I think that would have been his lot,” he said.

Initially the man was reluctant to hold on, as he wanted to reach his dog that had been washed in with him, but the two men shouted at him to leave the animal, which they’d go back for afterwards.

As they began to drag the man in, the rope on the life ring started catching on the granite wall and began to fray. Roo knew they had to try something different, so instead they dragged him along the harbour wall to get a different angle to pull on.

At one point the force of the water pouring out of a waste pipe meant the man lost his grip on the ring, but he just about managed to keep hold of the rope.

Eventually, after a space of only five or six minutes, but which felt far longer, the man was back on the beach, in shock but unharmed apart from a nasty gash on his knee from being bashed against the rocks.

Roo and Yogi then began thinking of a way to rescue the dog, which kept trying to swim back to the point it fell in. Knowing they must fight the instinct to enter the water themselves, Roo searched the beach for items to drag the animal out with and found an old fishing net and a buoy.

After three or four attempts – including, at one point, the dog getting washed down the waste pipe, only for it to be flung out with the next gush of water a few seconds later – the pair managed to safely drag him back onto the beach, to huge cheers from the crowds of onlookers.

“Everyone was in tears afterwards,” added Roo.

A number of people found towels for the man, with one little boy even offering his dinosaur fleece, and Roo found and old piece of carpet to wrap around him to stop the wind, until the ambulance arrived.

It was only by chance that Roo, whose brother Tristan owns the well known local business Jumunjy Thai Cuisine, was there at all. Having been on a tour of the coast to take photographs, he, along with his father Chris, Karen and her daughter, had very almost not bothered stopping at Mullion as dusk was falling.

“I just about to turn off the other way and then I thought, ‘Oh we’ll only just be a couple of minutes’.”

He said after the rescue he did not understand why “all this madness” had broken out about it, adding: “If anyone was there they would have gone out and done the same thing.”