NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (14 May 2008) — A 33-year-old certified diving instructor from New Orleans drifted in the Gulf of Mexico for three exhausting hours before he was rescued Tuesday, according to the U.S. Coast Guard. John Anders had been spear-fishing from a 26-foot catamaran-type boat near an oil rig located 30 miles south of Grand Isle when a possible (scuba) tank malfunction propelled him into an undertow and carried him 300 yards away from the boat. "Maybe his tank leaked or somehow decompressed," said Petty Officer Scotty Hendricks, a Coast Guard operational director. Anders was fishing near the rig because waters near them are typically good spots to spear sports fish. "Instead of fighting three- to four-foot seas, he let the current just carry him," Hendricks said. "Three hundred yards is a long distance to swim against those kinds of seas." William Wall, a Baton Rouge native and the captain of the catamaran, told the Coast Guard that Anders told him he tried to yell for help from fellow divers, but none of them heard him. Realizing he was on his own, Anders decided to drift with the current until it carried him to an oil rig he spotted in the distance. When he got near it, Anders planned to get the attention of the crew or just grab on to it, Wall said. The problem was that the oil rig was up to eight miles away from where Anders started out, Henricks said. According to Lt. Russ Hall, a Coast Guard spokesman, the divers noticed Anders was in trouble when he missed a check-in time at the catamaran shortly before 1:15 p.m. Wall then radioed the Coast Guard for help, and they responded by sending out a rescue helicopter from its air station in New Orleans, Hall said. Approximately three hours after he disappeared, crewmembers aboard the ship Discover Deep Seas saw Anders and thought he was one of their own crewmembers who had gone overboard, Hall said. They also radioed the Coast Guard for help. The rescue helicopter eventually spotted Anders near the ship, which sent out crewmembers on a small motorboat to fish Anders out of the water. The ship is owned by Houston-based oil company Transocean. | | At approximately 1:15 p.m., watchstanders at Coast Guard Sector New Orleans received a call from a member of the dive team after the diver missed a check-in time. Sector New Orleans immediately launched an HH-65C rescue helicopter crew from Air Station New Orleans to respond. After some initial confusion, the rescuers realized Anders wasn't a fellow crewmember, but was in fact the missing fisherman the Coast Guard was searching for. They took Anders onto their ship, where a medic examined him and found him exhausted from (drifting) for so long, Hendricks said. No major injuries were reported. Hall said, "He was definitely in danger. The water was fairly cold, and the wet suit helped insulate him from some of the element." But Anders was eight miles away from where he originally started, and the distance he drifted opened up the Coast Guard's rescue quite a bit. Based on the Coast Guard's search patterns, the search area would've widened the more that time passed, resulting in a longer search. Additionally, the more time Anders spent lost at sea, the more likely the incident may have resulted in tragedy, Hall said. Guy Cantwell, a spokesman for Transocean, said that crewmembers on all of his company's ships train to respond to precisely this type of scenario. Obviously, "it paid off well in this situation," he said. Neither Anders nor Wall could be reached for comment. SCUBA FORUMDISCUSS THIS TOPIC - Dive in and have your say at Scuba Forum |
