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> Outside the boat, Sarah, Hissora and the others who had jumped off eventually found the two life rafts, which had deployed after the sinking. As they clambered on board, they saw the boat's captain and a number of other crew members were already there.

> "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.

Sadly, absolutely nothing and no one in Egypt can be trusted. It is even worse that the former Soviet Bloc where I grew up, and where you always had to divide your expectations of competence, functionality, compliance etc. by, say, three. (Nowadays, two.)

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.

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 ;)

True, a lot is done by foreigners; but even organizing someone else to provide reliable service to you is a nontrivial competence.

Plenty of rich places work like that. Already ancient Athens had their metoics.

In Egypt, when you are in a position of power - for instance, captain, CEO, president - you aren’t actually responsible for anything. It’s more of a sinecure, where you are there to be honoured and pampered by your underlings.

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.

It's quite interesting as other Islamic countries I've been to will guard guests with their life and will basically starve themselves to make sure you eat. Protection of guests is a pillar of the culture and religion in most the Middle East. If you are anywhere east of Egypt and you knock on a door you can pretty much bet that unless you're arrested or killed immediately you are absolutely safe.

I think it’s the colonial influence - the French and the British officer classes basically just swanned around in hedonistic luxury, idling away their days, and gave people Ideas about what “being in charge” looked like. These ideas are strongly heritable.

Pretty big caveat on that last sentence..

Sure, but nice to find out quickly at least :)

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.

I don't think the divers on a dive boat are considered guests of the captain. So yes the custom exists but it's very nuanced.

If you've ever been to that country, or any similar country, you would notice that real professional competence across whole society is scarce, and most tourism industry is just barely faking it in terms of security and professionalism. Or to put it in different words - don't do extreme sports there, safety net is very thin.

Deadly diving accidents are common there too, mostly due to lack of professionalism of instructors, either locals or for some reason russians.

I have dived in the red sea dozens of times over decades. There are many solid dive operations. It's probably at least a notch or two above the rest of (edit: Egyptian) society since it's a bit of a bubble that works mostly with foreigners. Still not up to western standards but also not as bad as you make it sound. It's one of the world's most popular diving destinations and incident rates aren't that high. There are many good instructors but you do have to be more careful.

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.

Generalize much? How many duck boat sinkings took the lives of tourists in the US? Were you also so keen to criticise American society as a whole and "similar countries"?

Based on this list, it was 34 fatalities from three duck boat sinkings:

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)

Tangent: this article contains the claim regarding DUKWs on D-Day: "Only one boat made it to the beach—the rest sank, taking soldiers and supplies with them." From what I can find this seems to be highly inaccurate and while there were some sinkings, DUKW boats at D-Day seem to be generally considered to be successful. This error is egregious enough to call the author's overall trustworthiness into question for me.

There are of course professional and competent people in Egypt, and I've worked with many. However, there is very stiff competition in the tourism sector, education in workers is low, regulations that exist are mostly only used to elicit bribes by officials, so all corners that can be cut, are.

Generalization sucks but you can't say it's not true.

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.

Better in what way? And Eastern Europe can range from Czech Republic, to the Balkans, to even include the Caucasus, and of course Russia. I'd wager half of Eastern Europe has better society than majority of the US excluding parts of the East Coast and the West coast.

Are you from Europe or US?

European living in the US :)

Oh okay, thats nice i'm from the UK. Would love to connect over call as I see you are a startup owner right?

Not the OP, but his generalization about North Africa is spot on.

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.)

Morocco and Tunisia don’t seem terrible. But you’re also neglecting the effect of climate change since antiquity on agriculture there.

After 1948, the ancient communities of Greeks, Jews and Armenians were driven out of Alexandria by the new Arab nationalist government.

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.

In violent agreement- unfortunately, they were identified with the British occupation/administration.

See also: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Ireland_Craig

It seems not much has changed after the Red Sea Agressor dive boat burned down in 2020 killing one guest.

Reminds me of this older story, of Harrison Okene, who was trapped in a capsized boat at the bottom of the ocean for 3 days: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/sep/26/i-survi...

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!

Thank you for sharing about Okene, what a great story.

Or a mini Poseidon Adventure

If I remember it right, Mythbusters did the "sinking boat will pull you under" and found it was a myth?

they busted it with a 9 ton boat but now I’m unconvinced because they did demonstrate the effect with a large weight dropping straight down in a pool, so what effect was that?! They were testing Titanic myths and didn’t touch on the fact that Titanic famously dropped like a stone!

https://youtu.be/rvU_dkKdZ0U

Mythbusters is not rigorous. You'd be foolish to bet your life on the outcomes of any of their experiments.

After several hours trapped in the air pocket, the dive guide, Youssef, wanted to try to swim through the boat, but Lucianna and Christophe persuaded him not to. "Stay with us because they are going to come to get our bodies, so they will find us," Lucianna recalls telling him.

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.

Being an advanced scuba diver is absolutely no indication of one’s ability to freedive. You Absolutly can not compare the two besides both taking place underwater.

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.

The Egyptian dive guides are often pretty good freedivers, especially when they started out as boat boys, they often freedive every day to fasten ropes to the reef.

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.

I wouldn’t sacrifice a life just to improve my own odds. What cold logic you imagine of those people!

Edit: ah, name checks out.

Presumably they had no idea if the boat was on the bottom of the sea or not, and at what depth.

I would imagine they would be able to feel the movement and sound of the waves which would tell them they were still afloat.

Maybe not exactly at that point, but the article said they could hear the rescue helicopters, but still had to wait more than a day in darkness to be rescued.

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.

Still, rationally thinking, which is presuming a lot in the situation, I can't find any real advantage to the two tourists of having the dive guide not try.

Maybe they were just worried about his wellbeing.

There reason she gave was "Stay with us because they are going to come to get our bodies" so I think they were beyond worrying about anyone's wellbeing :( What a nightmare.

I read it as "They are going to come to get our bodies so there is a chance we'll make it out of here alive if we just wait".

That makes more sense than my interpretation!

Furniture moving to one side on the top deck sounds most plausible to me.

What kind of furniture is heavy enough to cause that? It'd have to be tons of weight, and anything that isn't chairs and tables would be bolted down.

You see that the ship was already very top-heavy and unstable. 200-400kg would have been enough, with 1.5m waves and a stupid captain.

Kinda wild that the Egyptian gov just put out a made up cause with zero evidence instead of saying cause unknown currently

See this unrelated story from a few weeks back... https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/masks-smoke-and-mirrors-...

How could 3 adults, even lying perfectly still, not use up all the oxygen in that air pocket within 35 hours?

I thought human beings needed several cubic meters of fresh oxygen (at 1 atm) per hour…

You got me wondering and I thought maybe there was some kind of gas diffusion where carbon dioxide is absorbed by the ocean water instead of building up in the enclosed space, and finding the most closely related stack exchange question I think I’m satisfied with this answer:

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-...

They were in the engine room. The engine would have both air intake and exhaust systems. There was potentially some portion of one or both systems interacting with other air pockets.

Yeah, I think the co2 and o2 would diffuse in and out of the water below and eventually equalize, similar with how aquarium co2 indicator works.

Mr Nimbus gave them gills to save them and wiped their memory :)

Mr nimbus also controls the police!

It might be enough. Google says a human needs 300-550 liters of oxygen a day. That equals to about 6.8-12.4 cubic meters of air for the 3 of them for 36 hours.

The space does seem like it could be large enough to hold that much air, especially if it's compressed a little.

Not at 1atm. The air was pressurized.

It doesn’t sound to me like the boat actually sank. In the article it mentioned that they heard the rescue helicopter from within. Wouldn’t that imply that the pressure inside would be one atmosphere? Am I thinking about the physics of this wrong?

The pressure of any trapped gas will be equivalent to the depth of the lowest level containing air - so if the bottom of your air bubble is a meter below sea level, your pressure will be 1.1 atm.

Sound does carry remarkably well through water - but you're right. The ship capsized, but the hull held enough air that it stayed afloat.

Mostly, the weight of the boat pulling down would compress the air bubble a bit, probably not very much though.

It was floating upside down.

There is a picture towards the end of the story.

How is that? It was at surface pressure and then rolled over.

If the booyancy of the trapped air was a significant factor in the boat not sinking, then the air would have been at pressures over 1atm.

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.

Makes sense if the glass is perfectly vertical, air can’t escape and force is applied from the top. But if you capsize a glass by slightly turning it on its side such that most of it sinks and the air escapes by water displacement you would get some compression on the remaining air but its unclear how much.

In this case, the boat was floating, albeit upside down. So the volume of air trapped must have been sufficient to keep a 44 metre boat afloat; i.e. not a trivial amount.

Why didn't these divers free dive out? Should have been pretty easy?

So I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're not a diver or free-diver. I've done a lot of diving and a little bit of free-diving.

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!

Red sea isn't that cold though, likely something like 23 Celsius, this was winter so it's slightly colder. In the summer I've dived the red sea with no wet suit and it's certainly not a problem to swim for some time.

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?

If I was in my cabin and the window was possible to swim out of I would probably go for it. If I was in the back of the boat and downstairs so I had to navigate corridors and stairs in the dark and upside down I would probably try and wait. Also, if I knew for sure I was in say 15m of water or perhaps 20m, I would also try and go for it, especially in tropical areas in the daytime. How light it is and shallow it is would be a huge factor for me. Disorientation is real so upside down boat in the dark is a huge nope.

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.

This is like hearing about two people falling off a cliff right after each other and dying. Then someone says: I wonder why the first person didn’t catch on to the ledge, grab the other person with their other arm and pull them and themselves back up.

It’s the sort of thing that would only make sense in a movie.

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!

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...

Breathing out isn’t the issue. Sure, you’ll rupture your airways if you don’t, but you’ll still get decompression sickness if you do.

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.

I don't think decompression sickness is the main concern here. Dive boats would usually anchor somewhere relatively shallow. You're probably making some decision reasonably quickly so you haven't absorbed that much nitrogen yet. If you're >50m deep you have other problems (like depth narcosis).

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.

Freediving inside an enclosed space is known as “angling for a Darwin Award”.

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.

Most SCUBA divers don't train freediving, next time at the pool see how far you can dive on one breath. Then imagine being panicked, in the dark, in a ship you don't know that well, in the machine room you've never been in before, where now everything is upside down and at an angle, filled with water and all kinds of stuff floating around.

Do I have to? It’s going to give me nightmares.

Yeah, if he’d tried swimming out there’d have been one less survivor.

Clearly it wasn't, having diving certificate doesn't make you magically an Aquaman.

Also, presumably they did not know if the boat was on the bottom of the sea or not, and at what depth.

> But Lucianna is critical of the fact the Egyptian navy had to rely on volunteers. "We waited 35 hours. I don't understand how there are no divers on the Egyptian military boats."

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!

Some people are just wired differently. It's the difference between the person who will get out of their own car and help someone push theirs or the person who will intercede when someone is being assaulted instead of walking past. It's not adrenaline, it's the need to help. Luckily for others, some of us have this flaw.

About 30% of deaths in cave diving are rescuers. This is very similar situation!

Is that how it works when military personnel is called to assist in disaster rescue?

“Seems kind of dangerous. I’m a professional, I won’t go there, let’s wait for amateur volunteers to show up.”

They did assist. They saved many lives, but waited until it was safe for them! It is not their job to increase number of victims!

Professional first responders risk their lives all the time to help others. Rescue situations are nearly always risky by their very nature.

I would bet there is a gulf of difference in equipment and training between rich countries' first responders and personnel on some random navy ship in poor and curruption-ridden Egypt.

Real life is not Paw Patrol! Watch latest interviews with firefighters from California!

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...

"You have to go out. You don't have to come back"- Coast Guard unofficial motto.

>Why should divers risk their life to save anyone?

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...

Our society isn’t low-trust. It may not be as high trust as Scandinavia, but until you’ve lived in a real low-trust society you don’t know how bad it can get.

We? That was a Belgian asking about search and rescue in Egypt.

Yeah go to country on a different continent and they might not have great search and rescue operations. Like how would you know.

Is this sarcasm? I hope it's sarcasm.

Why would the military navy or coast guard risk their lives to save some tourists from a sinking boat, when they could professionally watch from a distance through binoculars? /s

Maybe because it's part of their job drscription?

No, their primary job is to protect borders!