Five days of search and rescue operations in Palau ended without recovery of two experienced tourist divers who went missing at the Peleliu Wall site on 7 September. But mystery still surrounds the circumstances of their disappearance.
Divernet had originally reported the disappearance of the divers at the foot of an earlier report on a cylinder explosion in Italy.
Palau authorities have since identified the missing divers as 62-year-old Singaporean national Tan Soon Liang (also known as Robert) and 43-year-old Chinese national Xiaoxi Wu (also known as Helen).
They had been diving from the liveaboard Black Pearl, part of the Singapore-based Pearl Fleet. Peleliu Wall is renowned for its marine life, though local authorities emphasise that it is an advanced, technically demanding site because of unpredictable, powerful downcurrents and vast drop-offs.
Tan was an SSI Instructor Certifier with more than 5,100 logged dives, and Wu was an Advanced Open Water Diver with 243 logged dives. They had entered the water as part of a led group of 14 divers.
Both divers had chosen to wear their own personal satellite/GPS tracking units rather than using the secondary location units provided by the Black Pearl.
Entangled line
Forty minutes into the dive at 8.25am the divemaster had signalled the group to unhook from the wall and begin their ascent. Noticing that buddy-pair Tan and Wu were still attached to the wall as Tan’s SMB line had become entangled, he descended to help.
The line was freed and the two divers gave ‘OK’ hand signals, but as the rest of the group performed safety stops near the surface, the divemaster saw the pair halt their ascent and begin going back down into deep water.
He attempted to chase after them but was forced to turn back after reaching his maximum depth limit and experiencing dizziness, surfacing alone.
At 8.45 Palau’s Bureau of Public Safety received a missing-persons emergency alert, triggering immediate deployment of search vessels.
The intensive five-day search operation that followed had involved Palau National Marine Law Enforcement search and rescue personnel, Peleliu State Rangers, the US Coast Guard Joint Rescue Sub-Centre in Guam and local private and commercial vessels. It was called off on the evening of 11 September, according to Palau’s Ministry of Justice.
A ministry spokesperson noted that because the water surrounding Peleliu Wall drops rapidly to depths exceeding 300m, deepwater recovery operations were extremely difficult.
Investigators were questioning the other divers in the group, who came from Australia, Germany and Japan, to see if they could help to determine why the two divers reversed their ascent, or whether they had been caught in a severe downcurrent.
