SA couple drown off Bali as boat overturns in choppy seas

Bystanders did all they could to help a Despatch couple when they were whipped around in choppy waves before drowning while on holiday in Bali last Monday, one witness said.

“We tried,” Luke Scarborough of the UK said. “No one could go in or [the] same thing would have happened to them.”

Scarborough and his girlfriend had been at Nusa Lembongan island when the boat of SA farmer Victor Allers and his Brazilian wife Fatima Turner overturned near Devil’s Tear cove. “The boat got too close to the cove and the next thing we knew, a big wave came. The boat flipped over, rolled and turned again,” he said.

He rushed off to alert the authorities to what had happened and saw the two tourists and captain “drift around” as the waves crashed against them.

He believed Allers and Turner died quickly. Neither had been wearing life jackets.

Scarborough and other bystanders used floating rings and rope to try and help the three people in the water.

“We couldn’t even get near them. The captain had managed to grab hold of one after he was in the water for about 30, 40 minutes,” he said.

“He had just managed to keep his head above the water. We pulled him up and took him to an ambulance. But there was nothing we could do.”

The waves had been choppier as the tides were affected by the full moon.

Last Monday was meant to be the final day of the married Eastern Cape couple’s twoweek vacation.

Bali’s Search and Rescue Agency told local publication Coconuts Bali that Allers and Turner had died after their boat capsized, while the captain of Nagasima-Go, who was taking the two around Nusa Lembongan, was injured, but survived.

Relative Belinda Coetzee last week said the couple, who each had one child, had been island-hopping in Southeast Asia at the time.

They owned a welding business and a pig farm just outside Despatch, between Port Elizabeth and Uitenhage in the Eastern Cape.

The couple were retrieved from the water by a passing boat but were already unconscious, Coconuts Bali reported.

They were declared dead at a local community health centre.

– News24 Wire

We couldn’t even get near them