NZ, Texan centres unite for rescue
Divers in trouble helped by joint response
Aco-ordinated effort between New Zealand and Texas response centres saved two divers who had been dragged out of sight of their boat off Kāpiti Island in December.
Judy and Regan, who declined to provide their last names, had been experiencing their 101st dive together with another pair of diving buddies and their boat skipper on December 9.
They planned a decompression dive near Kāpiti Island while they photographed the underwater scenery and wildlife.
“We decided on a run time of 90 minutes and the rules on our boat were that if we weren’t back or spotted by 100 minutes, the skipper would alert the authorities,” Regan said.
Judy added, “We left the bottom at 50 minutes and did 20 minutes of decompression stops after sending up a surface marker buoy.”
They popped up on the surface at about 75 minutes and saw they were about 500 metres from their boat.
“We could see the skipper and we held up our surface marker buoys [SMBs] and waited for the boat to see us,” Judy said.
The pair said the waves were a bit choppy and they thought the boat might be picking up the other two divers which would explain why they weren’t seen straight away.
However, the current kept pulling them south.
They were wearing their dry suits, carried a personal locator beacon (PLB) along with their other equipment, and said they were comfortable with no real fear for their safety.
“We discussed when to set off the PLB once we hit the 100-minute mark and decided to do it 20 minutes after the run time, as the search would have already started,” Regan said.
“We had absolute confidence that their skipper would have sounded the alert on time.
“At 11.10am we pressed the button on the Garmin InReach and at 11.12am the Garmin response centre in Montogomery, Texas, responded they had received it.”
The response centre alerted the NZ Rescue Coordination Centre and also called Regan’s emergency contacts, starting with his father, who saw the overseas number and immediately blocked it thinking it was a spam call.
However, Garmin left a voice message and then called the other emergency number, Regan’s brother.
Regan was also able to send extra information on their situation by carefully texting a message, one letter at a time, saying they were drifting at sea.
Garmin passed it on to New Zealand and sent a return message saying the Coastguard was three minutes away.
In all, the pair were drifting for an hour and a half and reported being sore and tired the next day from holding up their 1.8-metre safety sausages.
They couldn’t help but think of diver Rob Hewitt who spent 75 hours adrift at sea in 2006 after he was caught in a rip tide and dragged away from his boat off Kāpiti.
Both were extremely grateful for the rapid Coastguard response and have joined up and made a donation.
Coastguard skipper Mark Davidson was impressed with how wellorganised and prepared the dive group was.
“When we reached the skipper of the dive boat we immediately felt more comfortable. They had all the gear, the right information and were well trained and well equipped,” he said.
Davidson said the dive boat stayed where it was while the Coastguard boat went to the area where the divers were most likely to have surfaced if there had been no problems underwater. The pair were spotted almost immediately and pulled aboard to safety.
“They did everything