Sea tragedy: Diving to retrieve bodies too dangerous

It seems as if the families of 14 fishermen who died at sea at the weekend will not be able to give their loved ones a proper burial after all.

The bodies of the 14 fishermen from Cape Town, George and Mossel Bay are apparently trapped in the wreckage of the fishing trawler on which they worked.

The trawler, the Lindsay, sank after a collision with another ship on Sunday and settled at a depth of about 150m.

Craig Bacon, director of the Viking Inshore fishing company, said on Tuesday the company was investigating the possibility of employing divers to retrieve the bodies.

"We are considering all options, but at this stage it seems retrieving the bodies would be virtually impossible," Bacon said.

Ian Gray, commander of the National Sea Rescue Institute (NSRI) in Port Elizabeth, said police would have to decide whether to dive for the bodies or not.

Police conducted sonar tests in the area where the Lindsay went down - about eight nautical miles from Sardinia Bay - to search for the bodies.

"It is out of our hands. But as I understand it, such deep dives are dangerous. A platform will be needed to dive from, but I know of only a few such diving operations ever attempted in the Eastern Cape," Gray said.

Louis van Aardt, owner of Pro-Dive in Port Elizabeth, said there were a number of technical divers in the Eastern Cape who were qualified to dive deeper than 100m.

Time limit
"I am trained to do this, but if someone came to me with such a request I would turn them down. There are too many risks involved," Van Aardt said.

He said ordinary sport divers dive about 40m deep. For a dive of 150m, divers wearing a diving suit would need special equipment.

"There is about 16 bar of pressure at 150m under the surface. But time is the problem, not pressure. One would have very little time to spend on the wreck because it would take hours to return to the surface," Van Aardt said.

He said the strong sea currents, which could drag a diver off course, would also pose a problem during a dive for the Lindsay.

He said at that depth a diver's motor skills were much slower.

Airbags could be used to bring the bodies to the surface.

The search for the wreckage of the Oceanos, which sank in 1991, took a long time.

Three divers who explored the inside of the Oceanos in 2003, could spend only 15 minutes on the wreck before they had to return to the surface. The Oceanos is 93m under the surface, about 14 nautical miles from Koffie Bay.

Source: www.news24.com