Day 6

Friday, April 15, 2016
Raja Ampat, West Papua, Indonesia
The first dive today was at a site called Boo window which as an island underwater which had a pinnacle at one end with a series of cut outs through the rock. We dived along the wall and then turned around and came back to the Windows to take photos swimming through them.
There were schools of blue lined snapper on the top of the reef and a few wrasse and Bumphead parrotfish grazing the coral .
We did see one little Grey reef shark out in the blue but it didn't come in close, and some of the lucky divers who were staying in top of the reef got buzzed by a manta.

The sun is shining again today so I hope it stays out to dry our bathers.

The second dive was awful with an annoying current that we seemed to be swimming into for part of the dive. I couldn't see much as the visibility was bad and the dive guide kept swimming out into the murk and asking us to follow. At the last pinnacle I ended up following the wrong guide and came up by myself not far from our tender.

While we were having lunch there was an emergency on the boat as one of the dive guides collapsed on the deck. Fortunately we have two nurses on board and they rushed to his aide.
It turned out that he had dived down to retrieve some gear that had fallen off the tender and had gone under the boat which was anchored in 80 metres of water . Not having enough air for decompression he came up to the surface too quickly and got badly bent.
A doctor from another boat came over to help after our nurses had performed CPR and defibrillation on him for at least half an hour and he is now stable while we are motoring towards Sorong to meet up with a speed boat that will take him back to hospital and an airlift to the chamber in Macassar
Not a good day today! And it is raining again.

Finally, at 7.00pm, 6 hours after the accident, Youris was picked up by a speedboat from Sorong and evacuated to hospital where he will be sent to the chamber for decompression. Lyn, one of the nurses went along with him just in case he went into cardiac arrest again. It doesn't look good but we can only hope for the best.

We are off again to another series of dive sites in the Dampier straits and one of the tender boats will pick Lyn up from a ferry tomorrow. Hopefully tomorrow will be a much better day. I don't think it can get any worse!

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2025-02-06

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