British divers saved four men during search for Thai boys

TWO British divers who helped rescue a football team and their coach from a flooded cave in Thailand had earlier saved four adults also trapped in the labyrinth, according to a report.

The 12 boys from the Wild Boars club and Ekapol Chanthawong, their coach, were cut off by rising water when they tried to explore the Tham Luang cave in northern Thailand on June 23.

They had been missing for nine days when divers Rick Stanton and John Volanthen found them on a ledge.

However, in a previously unknown twist, the two caving experts thought they had found the boys three days earlier when they surfaced from the zigzagging submerged passageways into one of the cave’s chambers to find four people waiting for them.

In fact, they had come across four inexperienced Thai water company workers who had got into difficulty during the chaotic early days of the rescue mission. For 24 hours, nobody had noticed they were missing and the men were in a life-threatening situation as the murky waters rose quickly.

The nail-biting encounter was described this week by Mr Stanton at a Hidden Earth cave-community event in Somerset, and reported by the caving news website Darkness Below.

Muddy water was “churning, swirling and eddying around them”, it said, as the British divers quickly formulated an impromptu plan to extract the four men.

The successful “snatch” extraction was key to building the British team’s credibility in the eyes of the Thai authorities, as was the advice of Vernon Unsworth, a British caving expert who lived locally and who had previously mapped out Tham Luang.