Boots on the Mud: How She Walked Away from the Rising Tide

Life or Death: Survivor Stories · Jul 24, 2026 · 16m

Boots on the Mud: How She Walked Away from the Rising Tide

Fog closed to the width of a body at 6:48 AM on June 14, 2019, and a woman’s boots were found upright and parallel in Crispin Reach tidal mud with no tracks for ten feet - yet a woman was later seen two miles from shore on a fractured leg. How did Nicole Phillips leave her boots and vanish into the white, and what happened during the six hours that followed?

In this episode, we tell the sequence of events from the discovery on the mudflat to the search that unfolded, following the timeline and the clues that shaped every decision…