Fancy that!! Isn't it ironic?

Fancy that!

He's got more than a dozen broken bones but Paul Hollinshead can see the irony after slipping off a boat while applying anti-slip paint.

The 40-year-old Paengaroa man fell 4m from the top of his brother's 10m launch last Friday morning after taking it for general maintenance to the Harbour Bridge Marina.

"We were doing a clean-up of the whole boat. We were up the top and I was putting anti-slip down. Somehow or other, I did a lovely flip and hit a steel pole on the way down with my head and landed face down on the concrete.

"It was like a demonstration of why I'm putting it [the anti-slip] up there," he said.

The injuries he sustained were serious and he was only released from Tauranga Hospital yesterday.

"I went forwards, I hit the bar with my head and did a spin.

"Everybody heard the thud. Literally, my entire face was blood.

"There's somewhere between 12 and 14 broken bones," he said.

Mr Hollinshead broke both his wrists, the bone behind his kneecap and his nose as well as fracturing under his eye socket, his jaw and his cheek bones.

He said he was rushed straight through once he got to the hospital and had seven doctors and nurses working on him.

"I was very lucky to survive. And probably just as lucky not to be in a wheelchair. If I'd hit my head to the side, I'd probably be six feet under now.

"That's what the doctors told me," he said.

A keen fisherman and a solo father, Mr Hollinshead said the two things he would find most difficult would be looking after his daughter while he was injured and not being able to get back out on the boat.

"I'm a full-time solo parent, so that's been hard. She [daughter Arisha, 7] was too scared to hug me because she didn't want to break me. They told me I won't be able to do anything for six weeks, [but] I'm dying to get back out fishing."

Luckily for Mr Hollinshead, on the day of the accident his mother received a phone call from an old friend who happened to be visiting from Auckland.

When Toni Hine learned of his friend's mishap, he made himself available to help out. He was only too happy to look after his old mate while he recuperated, he said.

Mr Hollinshead was understandably grateful.

"That's why you need friends in this world," he said.