Charter Boats, Diving Deaths And The Shaming Of The Diving Industry

In 1998 Tom and Eileen Lonergan went for a dive on Australia's Great Barrier Reef. They never returned. The crew of the dive boat they were on simply forgot about them, leaving them alone and lost in the vast ocean. It took two days before anyone even reported them missing and by the time the search was conducted nothing was found apart from a torn piece of Eileen's rash vest. It is believed they either drowned or were eaten by sharks. You may have read about the incident or if you didn't, you may have seen the film Open Water that was based on the whole tragic affair. Following this incident new rules were introduced to ensure that dive charters carried out accurate head counts, if 10 divers go in the water then 10 divers better come out of the water. Not exactly rocket science is it. Alas it seems, the art of counting is a skill that still evades Instructors and Dive Masters (and we use that term really loosely) around the world.

Sundiver Express

For instance in 2004, a year after the release of the film, the dive charter boat Sundiver Express left a diver behind following a dive off Newport Beach, California. The Sundiver was carrying a group of 20 divers and was staged near the oil rig Eureka. The diver in question Dan Carlock, experienced difficulty equalising, and was suffering from ear pain when he surfaced about 120 metres from the dive boat. Though he attempted to swim back to the boat, his legs cramped, so he waved a yellow safety buoy and blew his whistle. No one on the vessel noticed. A Dive Master working for Venice-based Ocean Adventures marked Dan Carlock present on the dive roster, even though he was absent when the remainder of the divers returned. As strong currents were picking up, the crew decided to move to a second dive site about seven miles away. When the divers left the boat for their second dive, Carlock was once again marked on the roster, even though he was on his own, several miles away from the boat. Three hours after leaving Carlock behind, the crew finally realised he was missing. The Sundiver’s Captain called the Coast Guard to the second dive site – miles from Carlock’s actual position.

 

The Coast Guard never found Daniel. Instead, he was spotted by a fifteen-year-old boy scout on board a tallship called the Argus. The ship was taking the scouts on an excursion and had veered off course to avoid a freighter. If not for the ship’s change in direction, it's possible that Carlock would never have been found alive. We suspect that Dan has been an ardent supporter of the boy scout movement ever since.

 

6 Years after the incident, Dan Carlock was awarded $1.68 Million in compensation for post traumatic stress and the fact that he developed skin cancer as a result of the sunburn he sustained while adrift. The court originally awarded $2 Million, but this was reduced as the judge considered that Carlock was partially to blame for surfacing so far from the ship. A decision that we and I suspect a great many will consider to be a harsh judgement at best and at worst, sheer bloody lunacy. Carlock was already in distress, and was surfacing due to that distress. It would be understandable then, that his orientation might have been affected. Somewhat different we might add, from failing to hear a whistle, failing to notice a diver waving a big yellow sausage around and marking a missing man as present, not once, but twice – some Judges eh!

Still you'd imagine that the Sundiver Express team would have learnt their lesson – never again would that happen! Err... Wrong. On 29^th December 2015 the Charter left another diver behind. That morning, Laurel Silver-Valker, went diving for lobsters off the coast of Catalina Island with Sundiver Express. The boat left the dive site without realising Silver-Valker wasn’t on board. The boat returned to search for Silver-Valker, but was unable to find her and notified the Coast Guard. She has never been found. Press coverage of the incident has suggested that although a competent and experienced diver, Silver-Valker was not diving with a buddy at the time and that as she had previously worked dive-boats to fund her diving, it is unclear in what capacity she was aboard and may not have been on the diver roster. Whatever answers, to how and why Silver-Valker was left behind, might come to light during the investigation, the fact that this is not the first time that the Sundiver has been involved in such a tragedy means the whole experience is likely to be a very painful and costly one for all involved. Not least because Sundiver Express should not have been trading in the first place. According to the Orange County Register the tour company Sundiver International Inc. of Long Beach has unfiled tax returns and $3,991 in unpaid taxes, according to the Franchise Tax Board. Records show the tax board suspended Sundiver International on Feb. 1, 2012.

“When a company is suspended, they are not supposed to be engaged in any business,” Melissa Marsh, a Los Angeles attorney who helps revive suspended companies told the Orange County Register. “They are not allowed to collect any money. The banks have a right to close their accounts.” Sundiver International previously operated as Sundiver Inc., under owner Ray Arntz. Sundiver Inc. was also suspended by the Franchise Tax Board on May 1, 2008, for unfiled tax returns, state records show. So was Sundiver Charters LLC on March 3, 2014. Arntz, who’s still registered with the state as Sundiver’s president and CEO, did not respond to Orange County Register's requests for comment on the story.

There are of course some who will point out that these could be isolated incidents, exceptions that prove the rule that dive charters are very safe and that getting left behind, although a divers worst nightmare, is as likely as being struck by lightening. Well, as the Sundiver story shows lightening does strike twice, in fact it strikes an awful lot. Take a cursory glance through the diving press and online and you'll find that the diving world is surrounded by a smoky fog of lightening strikes.

In Antigua in 2007, that's nine years since the disappearance of Tom and Eileen Lonergan, two British divers were abandoned for five hours when the dive boat weighed anchor and left. The two Dive Masters and one Instructor aboard seem to have miscounted and were only made aware that 2 of the 13 divers who were supposed to be aboard were missing when the divers wives inquired about their husbands whereabouts when the boat returned to dock. Fortunately, both were rescued, although they did suffer sunburn, cuts and stings during their ordeal. The outcome however could have been very different with rescuers of the two men slamming the dive crew as “breathtakingly irresponsible”.

In 2008, and for the Dive Masters out there, that's ten years since the Lonergan incident, a British man and his American girlfriend were left stranded overnight off the Great Barrier Reef. The two divers surfaced some 200 yards from the charter boat and despite waving frantically the crew did not notice and sailed away – another apparent head count gone wrong. The pair, adrift in the darkness, clung to each other overnight. Hypothermia began to set in as did the thought of what lurked in the darkness beneath. They were rescued the following morning by helicopter, the pilot who winched them to safety commenting that “they were in surprisingly good humour”.

 

In 2011, and once again on the Great Barrier Reef an American Snorkeller was stranded 30 miles offshore when his charter boat also sailed away. Again the victim of a mistaken head count. Fortunately for Ian Cole, he managed to swim for 15 minutes to reach a another boat that was anchored nearby. 

 

Later in 2011, Paul Kline and Fernando Garcia Puerta had to cling to a buoy for two hours after surfacing from their late-afternoon dive in the Atlantic Ocean three miles from Miami and finding no trace of their boat.'We were in shock. We could easily have died,' Kline, 44, told the Miami Herald.'If night had fallen, the situation would have turned into panic.'He said they kept talking to each other throughout their ordeal 'to try to keep up our high spirits'. Mr Kline said that he initially thought there had been a medical emergency aboard the boat, which is why it was not there when he and Mr Garcia surfaced 55 minutes into the first dive after studying coral reef. He said he assumed another boat would be sent back for them. Instead, the other divers on the trip had already boarded and the boat was en route to the second dive site with the captain unaware he had left the two behind. The captain of the dive boat, Mike Beach, refused to discuss the incident with reporters, saying only: 'Everybody is OK, no one is hurt, everybody is happy.' In 2005, British divers Louise Woodger and Gordon Pratley were rescued in the same area after being missing for four hours. They were found suffering from exposure and hypothermia after currents forced them away from their boat.

Even the most vociferous defender of “diving charters” would have to admit that the examples above do not paint a very good picture but such defenders would also no doubt reiterate that these incidents, horrific and distressing as they are, are the exceptions. They would probably also say that using diving charters is perfectly safe and that more people die from road accidents, DIY accidents and falling down stairs than on diving charters. This is absolutely true, but as a defence it is pathetic. The examples above aren't a description of some unusual unforeseen accident, they were the result of staggering incompetence. In fact, and this is just our opinion, they are the result of criminal negligence. All of them have one thing in common. The people responsible, simply failed to count. They had no idea who was in the water and who wasn't. In the case of Dan Carlock, he was marked on the roster twice when he was clearly – unless you're a mathematically challenged dive leader – not on board. Then there is the fact that in 2015, when the Sundiver Express left yet another diver behind, the company shouldn't even have been trading. 

 

Time after time, incident after incident the failure to carry out an effective head count or roll call has left divers in danger or led directly to deaths. How in all that is holy, can such incidents still be happening? How are the so called Dive Masters, Dive Leaders and Instructors throughout the world not utterly embarrassed that such incidents have not only happened but continue to happen? And don't think the blame lies just with the Instructors, Masters, et al. There were a great many other divers aboard these ships, did they not notice their numbers were a little short? Did none of these divers think to themselves that it was odd that the blonde girl, the bald bloke or the nice looking couple had suddenly vanished? Did none of them have the wherewithal to speak up? What sort of training are these divers receiving if responsibility for the safety of their fellow divers can be abdicated so easily? The whole diving industry should be ashamed of itself, it should get its head out of the sand and start to accept that being left behind by your charter boat is a very real and very present danger. 

 

ID Tag System, simple and effective

So what can be done? Well, Dive Masters and Instructors the world over seem to have a very rudimentary grasp of maths, so making sure that they can count would be a start. But roll calls and head counts are clearly not enough and should be backed up by a diver identification system like the Divers Alert Network DIDs boards. Recreational divers are given a tag they attach to their equipment, a tag missing from the board means a diver is still in the water. The boat doesn't leave until a roll call is carried out and all tags are back on the board. It's not brain surgery is it? Still as we have said before, there are a great many Instructors, Leaders and Jedi Masters (well they think they are) out there with all the badges and all the certificates in the world but not a brain cell between them. So relying on them alone is not good enough. What is needed to back up the roll calls and DIDs is ruthless prosecutions of those whose incompetence or negligence leads to such events. People need to go to prison and business need to be sued to destruction. But we would go further, every diving association that issues the certificates that allows people to run diving businesses need to be held to account as well. If one of their members is found to be incompetent or negligent, then that association should face heavy fines. Only when PADI, SSI, BSAC and the plethora of other badge selling organisations out there are made to face the consequences of their members actions will the industry have a chance of getting rid of all the incompetents that quite clearly infest it. The Associations would of course fight tooth and nail to stop such a thing a happening, they're are in the business of selling badges and certificates not safety so we won't hold our breath (no pun intended).

So if you thinking about going on a dive charter in 2016, we wish you luck and hope that the boat is still there when you surface, because as the examples above demonstrate, there's absolutely no guarantee it will be. And that really is shaming. 

Links

The Sundiver Express 2004 Incident

The Sundiver Express 2015 Incident

2007 Incident

2008 Incident

2011 First Incident

2011 Second Incident

Think It couldn't happen to you! Think again...

 

Jaws Should Be Terrified Of Us!

Forty years ago this week a dark fin broke the surface of the water around the fictional resort of Amity Island. To John Williams’ heart pounding theme, the 25-foot, three ton, Carcharodon Carcharius, promptly started chomping its way through naked bathers, fishermen and the odd water skier. Based on Peter Benchley’s best-selling novel, Jaws was an instant box office hit but controversy has always stalked the film much in the same way as Benchley’s shark stalked the residents of Amity. The project had been beset with problems during filming. The main stars disliked each other intensely, the mechanical shark that was used didn’t work properly and the director, Steven Spielberg, feared the whole thing would be a cinematic flop. The biggest controversy however, still remains forty years on. That controversy is the fact that many conservationists feel that Jaws propagates a myth, the myth of the “killer shark”. Peter Benchley, who would later become an advocator for shark conservation, even said he regretted writing the novel in the first place. “What I now know, which wasn’t known when I wrote Jaws, is that there is no such thing as a rogue shark which develops a taste for human flesh,” Benchley told the Animal Attack Files in 2000. “No one appreciates how vulnerable they are to destruction.” 

 

No one can deny that sharks do attack people and that these attacks are sometimes fatal. No one can deny either, the dreadful impact these attacks unquestionably have on the lives of survivors or the sense of horror and loss that families must feel when they are informed that their loved one has died as a result of a shark attack. Nor should we underestimate the psychological, drip, drip effect that news of these attacks has on the rest of the global population. 

In the movie Jaws, the towns Mayor, played by Murray Hamilton neatly sums this up when he tells Chief Brody (Roy Schneider): “Martin, it's all psychological. You yell barracuda, everybody says, "Huh? What?" You yell shark, we've got a panic on our hands...”

Then of course there is the notion that sharks serve little or no purpose in the ocean eco-system. Again this is neatly encapsulated in the film when the character Hooper, played by Richard Dreyfuss remarks that sharks are in essence machines. “…And all these machines do is swim and eat and make little sharks, and that’s all.” In short sharks only exist to swim around eating fish, surfers, swimmers etc and then pop off to propagate more sharks in order to continue the oceanic killing spree. But do sharks really deserve their reputation as voracious killers or is the idea of the “killer shark” really just a myth and if they serve no purpose as a species would it really matter if man looked upon them as a scourge of the oceans and simply wiped them out?

In 2014 there were 72 unprovoked shark attacks reported globally, seven of which ended in fatalities. Since 1900 the number of shark attacks reported has increased annually. The great majority of these attacks occur off the coasts of Australia, U.S. and South Africa. Florida is particularly prone to attacks with 54% of reported shark attacks in the U.S. occurring in that states waters. Troubling figures you might think, but let’s get some perspective. In the UK in 2014, road traffic accidents accounted for 1,713 fatalities. In the same year 42 people died in the U.S. as a result of dog bites and in Florida in 2014, firearms were used to kill 687 people.  Sharks don’t even make it onto the list of the top ten dangerous animals to mankind. Top of that list is the mosquito, which through transmission of malaria manages to bump off two million people every year, snakes kill on average 100,000, scorpions help 5000 people to shuffle off the mortal coil yearly and are followed in order by crocodiles, elephants, bees, lions, rhinoceroses, jellyfish and tigers. It is true that the number of shark attacks has increased yearly since 1900 but this is easily explained by the fact that the number of people entering the oceans has increased, More people swim, snorkel, dive, surf and play about on boats than ever before in history and thus there are more opportunities for interaction between man and sharks. Experts also cite the fact that reporting of shark attacks has improved greatly and so many more incidents are reported, logged and investigated. The great majority of attacks are often a simple case of mistaken identity, Surfers paddling on boards, divers and snorkellers floating near the surface, tend to resemble many a sharks favoured prey; seals. Swimmers splashing about in the shallows also attract sharks as they mimic the actions of fish in distress. Of course knowing that you have been mistaken for a seal is hardly going to enamour you to the toothy critter gnawing through your surfboard or heaven forbid your leg but it is worth remembering that your chances of being attacked is a staggering one in 11.5 million. 

Sharks do kill people but they are definitely not the deliberate, stalking killers of Jaws fame. But what if you’re not convinced? What if you still think that the ocean would be a much more pleasant place to frolic in without worrying about sleek, dark shadows lurking in the depths ready to sink a thousand razor sharp teeth into your flesh. What would a world without sharks be like?  The law of unintended consequences comes into play here. An ocean without sharks will not be the tooth free wonderland one might imagine. Sharks are the oceans top predators and if you remove them, then the chances are that the creatures they prey on will proliferate. These creatures in turn, unimpeded by predation, will overwhelm the food chain below.  In the U.S. in 2007 it was reported that over fishing of sharks in the northwest Atlantic had led to a boom in other marine species and as a consequence commercial fishing for oysters and scallops had been devastated. Most experts believe that the removal of sharks from the ocean would lead to catastrophic effects on the lower parts of the food chain. The bottom end of the chain would be destroyed and as a result reefs would die and the water itself would become a cloudy morass of detritus, jellyfish and microbes. The oceans as we know them now would become little more than a memory. A trip to the beach doesn’t sound that inviting if your sunbed is situated just a few metres away from a smelly, slimy oceanic bog infested with jellyfish rather than a crystal clear, azure ocean does it? We have much more to fear from an ocean without sharks than we have of sharks being in the ocean.

It might already be too late however. Shark numbers are in sharp decline and as usual it is man that is driving this decline.  Between 70 and 100 million sharks are killed every year. Most are killed to supply the repulsive shark fin soup trade. Shark fins sell for hundreds of dollars each and although the soup produced is bland and nutritionally useless, it is highly regarded in China and South East Asia with single bowls of the stuff reputedly selling for $150. Although 85% of shark fins are moved through Hong Kong, don’t think that the problem is simply an Asian issue. Mexico, Argentina, U.S.A, New Zealand and Nigeria have significant shark fishing industries. The practice of shark fining is banned in the European Union but European fishermen still net an estimated 100,000 tons of shark each year. Spain, France and Portugal are the leading culprits; together they are responsible for 12% of the global shark catch. Deliberate fishing isn’t the only problem either; a great many sharks are killed accidentally in commercial fishing nets and are hooked on long lines.

The rogue killer of Jaws fame it seems is far more threatened by man than man is by it. 

The myth of the “killer shark” really is just that, a myth. Yet that myth still seems to have a strong, cold grip, on our imagination. But here’s a thing, Peter Benchley’s novel and Spielberg’s film aren’t the problem here. Sharks and the fear of their attacks have terrified us long before Robert Shaw delivered that hair-raising U.S.S. Indianapolis monologue in the movie. Sharks are supreme predators with mouths brimming with razor sharp teeth and being wary of them is just common sense. But there is a difference between having a healthy respect for sharks and hysterical fear. Jaws is just a movie, a very good movie mind, but nevertheless just a movie and its main character, that 25-foot shark, is a mechanical fake. Jaws is simply Hollywood entertainment just as The Terminator movie is, and like the Terminator you have to willingly suspend your disbelief or the whole thing becomes preposterous. We, man, are the real problem here. Our fear of sharks is often driven by ignorance, helped in no small part we’re sure, by media hysterics when an attack occurs. We need to grow up here, we need to educate ourselves and learn that sharks are not mindless, cold-hearted killers but the supreme pinnacle of marine evolution. We need sharks, the oceans need sharks and if we want to keep our coral reefs and marine eco-systems, if we want to swim in azure waters and enjoy the benefits of healthy seas we are going to have to stop thinking like children and start thinking like adults. We are going to have to accept that even in a perfect world a little danger must always lurk.

Debunking the myth, the Sharkwater Film. Please check this out if you haven't already seen this brilliant 2007 film.

Shark Tracking - global shark incidents tracked yearly