Two men and a six-year-old boy have been treated for hypothermia after a dramatic rescue from a sinking boat off the North Queensland coast.
The vessel broke down in waters near Cape Bowling Green, south of Townsville, on Sunday afternoon.
A Volunteer Marine Rescue crew was sent to retrieve the trio but encountered their own emergency on the way.
"[The rescue boat] was probably about an hour away from the vessel in distress and it had a catastrophic engine failure," said VMR Burdekin duty officer Warren Francis.
"It was blowing oil out of the exhaust and it just shut itself down.
"We were confronted with the problem of whether we continue ... or whether we bring that vessel home and send another vessel."
Mr Francis said the crew decided to persist with the rescue operation with a broken motor and arrived at the scene just before 5:00pm.
"By the time they hooked up a rope to tow the vessel, they began to see problems with the boat," Mr Francis said.
"Within probably one or two minutes it sank from underneath them."
The men and young boy were pulled from the ocean as their boat was submerged.
"We're really grateful that we continued on with that boat with the one motor, because had we tried to swap the boats out, those people would have been in the water on their own and in the dark," Mr Francis said.
"That would have been a terrible incident to deal with."
Mr Francis said the trio was "quite hypothermic" when paramedics met the group at the shore.
"They put [the six-year-old boy] in the cabin of the ambulance and heated it all up and tried to get his temperature back," he said.
The Queensland Ambulance Service said the group did not need to be taken to hospital.
Volunteer Marine Rescue said it would investigate the cause of the engine failure.
