A diver’s head is a tiny target, even under ideal sea conditions (“you’re looking for a cabbage”, a sailing instructor told me).įlags, DSMBs and signal mirrors can help searchers an air siren might be heard at short distances over quiet engines. In that time a diver can drift for miles, and night can fall. In others, they delayed reporting the incident for hours, hoping to find the divers themselves. In some incidents, boat-crew had no radio to summon help. If the boat has a proper accounting system, the crew know that they have divers missing and should get searching quickly, but this isn’t always the case. They don’t always follow briefings, and surface in the wrong place, or get caught in unexpected current and swept away.Ī skipper makes a mistake, or the boat breaks down. Causes of Separationĭivers get separated from boats for many reasons. The truth is, however, that when it came to such incidents, I was spoilt for choice.Īnd, all these years later, I still would be. He also pointed out the topicality of a dozen divers going missing from their liveaboard in the Red Sea just as the movie was hitting the cinemas. I thought divEr readers would be very interested, but the company wasn’t sharing, so my report stalled.Įxasperated, and with the imminent release of Open Water (the fictionalised film inspired by two divers left behind and never found off Australia in 1999) the Editor pushed me to finish the piece. That the article was so delayed was partly down to a long-gone Florida dive-operator refusing to discuss how it also forgot two of its customers, who spent 24 hours on a light-tower before being spotted by a yacht.Ī lawsuit followed and sentencing required the operator to share advice on how to avoid a repeat with anyone interested. It reviewed a handful of incidents in which divers and boats became separated. My resulting feature, Missing, was published in 2003. The first the dive-centre knew of their clients’ near-fatal ordeal was when the couple walked in and told them. Olga and Robert were not logged out of or into their boat, and were not missed. In the packed restaurant, there were no raised voices complaining about wrong dishes from any of the busy tables surrounding us, because the waiters had logged the orders. A fisherman had spotted them bobbing in the water three hours after they’d surfaced. They returned to shore with only six people.Īcross the table at a London pizza-house, I sat interviewing Olga and Robert, the pair abandoned off the coast of Cuba. And that’s the simple arithmetic that the crew of a luxury-resort speedboat couldn’t manage.
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