Trapped in the dark for 35 hours – Red Sea dive-boat survivors tell of escapes
bbc.com
bbc.com
> "There should be some supplies in here," Sarah remembers one of the other guests saying. All the people we spoke to recall a safety briefing mentioning that the life rafts had food and water in them - but they did not, the BBC were told.
> "We found a torch, but again it didn't have any batteries. We didn't have any water or any food," Sarah says. "There were flares, but they had already been used."
> Sarah also says of the three blankets on board the raft, one had been taken by the captain for himself, leaving one for the rest of the crew and another for the guests. "We ripped it up and huddled together," says Sarah.
Absolutely disgraceful behavior from the captain here. This is not a person who should be entrusted with a houseplant, let alone the wellbeing of any number of people on board that vessel.
Deadly diving accidents are common there too, mostly due to lack of professionalism of instructors, either locals or for some reason russians.
It is one of the few regions that regressed civilizationally since Antiquity. Zero advanced exports, lots of tyranny and dysfunction, natives vote with their feet by the millions, and no one in their sane mind moves there.
I don't particularly care about praising the US, a country I have never been to, but if you are trying to put some sort equivalence between Egypt and the US, you are deluding yourself. Quality of institutions in those two places ise mostly incomparable.
(The SF homeless situation may be an exception. Yeah, that could be North Africa, only with much more money burned on futile schemes to alleviate the problem.)
Given that these were the most educated and globally connected people in the country, Egypt shot itself in the foot in a way that is probably impossible to evaluate.
See also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Ireland_Craig
https://www.arnolditkin.com/blog/injury/dangerous-waters-a-s...
There were other fatalities but in different circumstances, mainly on land.
A quick Google turns up over a thirteen hundred dead in sinking incidents off Egypt in the last 20 years. Looks like Libya can't be far behind. They're in a completely different league and whilst generalisations can seen unpalatable it does seem tied to a careless approach to safety (as confirmed by all the mentions of safety equipment failure in the various incidents)
I'm from Eastern Europe and I'll say that in many aspects Western society is better than us, even if it's already way better than after the fall of the Soviet occupation.
It sucks but it is what it is.
These days there are a lot of Russians due to the war with Ukraine I imagine some of them have found work in the dive industry. The last time I visited was 2 years ago and there were certainly a lot of Russians but I didn't dive with them.
EDIT: I generally dislike Egypt, everyone smokes, an oppressive government. Third world. I'm not sure I'll go diving there again. But my experience with boat diving has been good, that's the only part of Egypt I like ;) I've had dives in Hawaii that felt less safe with instructors chasing people that bolt to the surface and other near misses and generally questionably run operations. I think the key in these third world countries is to chose specific operators.
This story is still better than it could be - I would expect the life rafts to be completely unmaintained and to sink immediately. Perhaps they were sturdy enough to survive years of neglect.
You can expect that the investigation will be an exercise in bureaucratic hush-up, too. If losing face is worse than death, death is the preferred outcome. Especially if it is someone else's death.
The Red Sea is beautiful, but caveat emptor. Ironically, Saudi Arabia may outcompete Egypt soon when it comes to seaside tourism. Saudis are a lot more competent when it comes to providing Western levels of service, and the current prince is ditching Islamic limitations real fast.
Only because they mostly don't do the work themselves ;)
Plenty of rich places work like that. Already ancient Athens had their metoics.
This seems to be a universal law there - any time I’ve done business there’s been some lavish lunch with the CEO while he talks about his horses, and then negotiations with Farid from accounts.
So… the captain in this case is just abiding by Egyptian customs. He is, in his and his crew’s estimation, the most important person on the boat, and is to be protected at all costs.
To be fair I was arrested immediately once in Kurdish Iraq... They just took me to go to wait at a hotel on my own honor and took my passport. After my friend and I were interrogated they decided we were good people and told me I could go anywhere I liked and gave me a police card if I needed help to make sure that happened, lmao.
video of his rescue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=um1ym9u8XaA
Randomly, the next year, he rescued his friend when their car goes off a bridge into water. He later became a diver!
An odd decision, I would have thought he was a good diver, so presumeably also a decent free diver, knew the boat well, could alert rescuers to the trapped people, and would not use up oxygen when gone from the bubble.
Noises are also very different above and below water - even when you’re in an air pocket. They knew they were still at the surface and trapped in a capsized vessel.
On top of that, even if this guide was a Divemaster which is far from guaranteed given the other safety failings from this company, being an advanced Divemaster does not equate to one’s ability to cave dive. Survivors state the lack of lighting in the boat and so I’m assuming he would have had to navigate the boat in complete dark under water. So while not exactly cave diving, it’s equatable. An activity that’s insanely dangerous to anyone, even Divemasters that don’t have cavern or cave experience.
There’s a reason there’s a grim reaper sign at the entrance of caves in popular dive locations.
Still, deciding that the guide should not try does not even make sense if there was only a 5% chance he'd make it, from the two tourists point of view.
Edit: ah, name checks out.
I thought human beings needed several cubic meters of fresh oxygen (at 1 atm) per hour…
Put a barometer in an empty, upside-down cup. Force the upside down cup 1/2 way down into the water, trapping the air inside.
The barometer will be at the sea pressure of the bottom of the cup.
There is a picture towards the end of the story.
probably that four-foot bubble communicated with a larger volume or air under the hull of the boat - and that's the most reasonable explanation of this miraculous survival.
When picturing it we might assume the rest of the boat is flooded and this pocket of air is all that remained but that may not be the case.
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/67970/surviving-...
The space does seem like it could be large enough to hold that much air, especially if it's compressed a little.
Doing it in a shipwreck is one of the most dangerous things you can possibly do. You won’t have the normal cues of up and down, won’t have any sort of decent lighting, and all the while your body wants to panic due to CO2.
Then, they’d been breathing compressed air. If they reached the surface they’d get the bends, and depending on depth that could kill them or cause serious damage.
Yeah, if he’d tried swimming out there’d have been one less survivor.
I would never, not a million years, try and free-dive out of a boat, especially a large and unfamiliar boat that had sunk. It's almost certain death to try and do so.
1) No Breath: First of all, the average person can roughly hold their breath a minute or lets be generous and say one and a half minutes. Well, that's in perfect comfortable conditions in a nice warm, safe, room. Now you're in cold water, you're in shock because your boat sank, and you're in the dark, you're likely highly anxious or panicking, you can now hold your breath 30-45 seconds if doing no work at all. If you're actively swimming for your life you probably last for 20-30 seconds IF THAT.
2) Getting Lost: Dive boats can be quite large, full of random objects, and if you've been diving on a boat for a few days only, there is little chance you are going to be able to navigate through the boat in the dark in good conditions, now imagine the boat is filled with water, completely dark and upside down. You are panicked and disoriented, if you somehow manage to find an exit it's almost entirely down to dumb luck.
3) Depth (and potential DCS). You have no idea what depth the boat has sunk to. So let's say it's at 50m, it takes a long time to surface from 50m and if it's already taken you 1 minute to get out of the boat, you're fucked again. Not to mention any DCS you may suffer if you've been breathing compressed air down at 50m for very long!
Maybe there are some combination of factors which would make this a good idea, like, very small boat with very obvious exits, warm water in the tropics, shallow water and its daytime so there is light to see by, and you're also a champion free-diver and regularly do 7-9 minute breath holds. Sure in these cases you might just swim out.
But if you're a normal person trying to swim out of a boat in the dark, upside-down, in unknown depths, cold water, random detritus floating everywhere, just stay put!
If the boat is at 50 m the chances of getting rescued in time are probably so low that it may even make sense to try as a last ditch effort? If you remember to breath out on ascent. Hard to say...
So even in the incredibly unlikely scenario that you reach the surface, you’ll have nitrogen bubbles in your bloodstream that’ll quickly kill you.
Look up a dive chart; fifty meters is much too far down, especially if you’ve been there a while.
Decompression sickness can kill you quickly if you get large bubbles in your brain or heart but that's less typical. Many cases of decompression sickness can be treated in a compression chamber within some reasonable amount of time after surfacing. Onset of decompression sickness is also often delayed by as much as 48 hours.
It’s the sort of thing that would only make sense in a movie.
I've also done a lot of diving and I'm not sure if I'd try or not. Dive boats are not that large and if it's a liveaboard you'll get very familiar with the boat pretty quick. There's typically a main cabin area/level, stairs to the cabins, and that's about it. If it's that or death then I might take my chances. Assuming you are in an air pocket then you have time to regroup, plan, and also take a deep breath. Dark is certainly a problem and not having a mask does make for a complication. It also depends where I am specifically on the boat. If you're talking about swimming out immediately when you wake up in the middle of the night and find yourself under water - yeah, that's a tough one. It's basically what these guys did though, they got to this air pocket. From the sound of it when they woke up the boat was not completely flooded either.
Looking at the video I agree this doesn't look like a great place to swim out of.
You can likely tell if you're on the surface or not. You're going to feel the swell, waves etc.
One takeaway is to have an emergency plan ready in advance. If you're super paranoid you can also have your mask with you. Some divers carry an extra compressed air bottle which would be handy too. Flashlight?
Would depend. I never do cheap liveaboards though, especially in the Red Sea, you get what you pay for. I've heard soooo many stories of sketchy liveaboards or other dive shops in the Red Sea area that I would always be very careful before picking a boat.
Why should divers risk their life to save anyone?! The boat was unstable, going inside would be dangerous! Some people are adrenaline junkies, and will volunteer for such thing, but you can not expect professionals to do that!
“Seems kind of dangerous. I’m a professional, I won’t go there, let’s wait for amateur volunteers to show up.”
Maybe because it's part of their job drscription?
Rescuers already put themselves into dangerous situation (operation on stormy sea). But at some point risks are too great, and there is no point to pile up more bodies. Or demand more rescuers, to rescue original rescuers...
Yeah, why should anyone do anything to help anyone else unless it's in their self-interest!
No wonder we live in such a low-trust society...
Yeah go to country on a different continent and they might not have great search and rescue operations. Like how would you know.