A club dive-boat capsized on Sunday, 5 April in the North Sound off Grand Cayman after six scuba divers had descended, leaving no surface cover.
The boat belonged to the long-established Cayman Islands Divers British Sub-Aqua Club, according to a report by the Cayman Compass.
Cayman Islands Coast Guard responded to a distress call, but its patrol boat arrived at the 18m-deep Ronnie’s Nemesis dive-site to find that the crew of two commercial tour-boats had already gone into action.
These vessels were operated by Captain Marvin’s Watersports and had been on their way out with groups of snorkellers to Stingray City. Crew-members had seen the club-boat listing and then suddenly overturning, and had called the Coastguard as they went to its assistance.
One of the Captain Marvin crew, James ‘Sugar Bear’ Jackson, had entered the water on snorkel to check that nobody was trapped beneath the boat.
He said that he had seen its scuba divers below, apparently unaware that anything was wrong. He had also seen air tanks dropping towards the seabed and could only hope that they would cause no injuries.
Surfacing divers
Jackson had stayed in the water to direct four of the shocked surfacing divers to board his boat. The arriving Coast Guard boat picked up the other two and later transferred the first four on board to join them. None of the divers was reported to have been injured.
Crew from the other Captain Marvin’s Watersports helped to collect flotsam such as dive-bags from the overturned boat, and another dive-boat, from Indepth Watersports,later stopped to pick up more possessions and recover some of the dive-tanks.
The sea surface was described as calm at the time of the incident, though a strong current was running. No official cause of the capsize has been released but the overturned vessel was later towed back to land for examination by the Royal Cayman Islands Police Service.
Cayman Islands Divers BSAC was established in 1969 and says that if weather permits it makes use of its boat for diving every week.
