Skipper called for help an hour after diver went missing
A dive-trip skipper has been grilled over calling emergency services an hour after a female diver went missing and making only one quick dive to find her.
The body of 37-year-old BuaNgoen Thongsi, also known as Goy, a Thai national living in New Zealand, was recovered by the police dive squad on February 10, 2015, two days after she went missing near Motunau Beach, North Canterbury.
The skipper was questioned at an inquest in Christchurch yesterday. Coroner Brigitte Windley had reconvened the inquest, which started in June, due to concerns about the reliability of the earlier evidence.
Yesterday, the skipper repeated evidence that Thongsi sank in a way that gave him a ‘‘sixth sense’’ something was wrong, however, it wasn’t until the bubbles stopped he realised she wasn’t breathing.
Thongsi had problems with her regulator but after he gave it a few pushes it seemed to fix itself, his earlier evidence said. He had then gone back to the wheel while another diver held onto her as she floated to the back of the boat.
His evidence contradicted evidence from the diver on the boat holding on to Thongsi who said Thongsi began sinking with a blank look on her face with no sign of life and did not appear to be breathing. He said he immediately realised something was wrong and alerted the skipper.
‘‘I don’t remember that,’’ the skipper told the inquest yesterday. ‘‘I’m not saying he’s wrong, I just didn’t hear him.’’
The diver later told the court he had ‘‘no idea’’ how Thongsi died, and that there was nothing he or the skipper did that could have caused her death. It was possible Thongsi was already dead by the time he tried taking her to the rear of the boat, he said.
The earlier inquest heard the Police National Dive Squad found nothing wrong with Thongsi’s equipment, while a professor said there was nothing in her medical history that could explain what happened.
David Boldt, counsel assisting the coroner at the hearing, put it to the skipper that he told a fisheries officer he had lost someone from his party and she ‘‘sank like a stone’’ while looking at him. The skipper told Boldt he might have exaggerated and could not remember telling her that. The skipper disputed telling the officer he knew Thongsi was dead as soon as she went underwater.
Other evidence showed the skipper told police in a statement about two hours after the incident that he reached the sea bottom and could not see anything so came back up.
However, his evidence at the inquests was he reached three metres from the bottom and went back up because he had no air.
‘‘As soon as the bubbles stopped I got the spare tank on and entered the water where I thought Goy went, I went straight down to the bottom, I couldn’t see anything and went straight back up to the top.’’
Once he was out of the water, he got back on the boat and did not dive again.
NO POINT SEARCHING
He told the inquest he did not think there was any point looking for her after she had been underwater for more than four minutes. ‘‘It didn’t occur to you even if Goy was dead, it would’ve been best for everyone, her and her family to find her body and brought it back up,’’ Boldt asked.
The skipper said he should have gone down a second time. He said the rest of the men on board were like a ‘‘stunned mullet’’. He did not make a call to emergency services until an hour after Thongsi was last seen.
At the time, the skipper told police he had ‘‘stopped thinking’’.
‘‘There’s a lot of emotions going on my head, I didn’t tell the crew, I was peed off for a lot of reasons I’m not going to tell why, I was just trying to think things over,’’ he told police.
In a question, Boldt said the police dive squad, members of the rescue boat and others said the way the crew reacted was ‘‘the absolute opposite’’ of what they normally see and the crew were desperate to get back on land rather than help with the search.
When asked by coroner Windley if he would have done anything differently, the skipper said he would have made the phone call straight away. ‘‘There’s a lot of things I could’ve done differently.’’
The coroner said the earlier evidence failed to disclose plausible explanations for Thongsi’s loss of buoyancy and death.