In February 1982 a Dutch supply ship passing through the South China Sea took on board unexpected cargo.
A group of Vietnamese asylum seekers had been drifting in a crammed boat for days, without food or clean water - and attempts to revive its engine were failing repeatedly.
Alisha Fernando was the boat's youngest passenger at only two years old.
"We were on a boat to nowhere and fast running out of options. If he had not saved us I don't have any doubt we would have died out there," she told SBS.
Listen: SBS reporter Kristina Kukolja has the story of how, three decades later, Ms Fernando would set out to meet the ship's captain.
That night Captain Willem Christ and his crew of 12 rescued 168 people, including Alisha, her mother and father, and uncle.
They were delivered to a camp set up for Vietnamese refugees with the help of the United Nations and the International Red Cross on the Malaysian island of Pulau Bidong.
On Captain Christ's ship they were fed and given water, and then their boat was destroyed to ensure that when their asylum applications were processed by the UN they would be given immediate protection.
"I put in my original logbook: 'Collision with straight floating object'. Then we took the people on board. Then when everybody was safe on board we had to sink the boat… And then for international law they were no longer refugees, but they were survivors," Captain Christ told SBS.
The family was resettled in Australia.
Ms Fernando's mother first tracked down Captain Christ soon after she arrived in Australia, and now more than 30 years on her daughter has travelled to Amsterdam to meet the man they call their saviour.
"It's been an amazing gift that I had the opportunity to have finally met the man who saved me, who has - along with my parents - afforded me the life I have today. I could have been a beggar on the street in Vietnam, or I could have ended up being one of those war statistics," she says.
Willem Christ says in the years following the Vietnam War, ships from the Smit Lloyd company rescued over 10,000 Vietnamese asylum seekers from the seas off south-east Asia.
He takes credit for only 400 to 500 of them.
He adds that transporting the Vietnamese to UN camps would take supply vessels out of action for days at a time, but always with the approval of his shipping company.
"I am quite often ashamed that I couldn't give them at the time anything more than a glass of water and I always tell them, don't say thank you to me. You were lucky that you met us in the South China Sea," says Captain Willem Christ.
Web extra: Alisha Fernando reunites with Captain Willem Christ
Watch the report via YouTube: Alisha Fernando reunites with Captain Willem Christ
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