Every one seems to be missing the basic point here which is that the boat was not properly equipped.
No life raft, no distress beacon, no bail out bag.
The BBC reported that the boat took around 5 min to sink. In a bail out situation 5 mins is practically forever.


That story also tells you that there is either no air sea rescue on St Lucia (which I doubt as it is a British colony) or that no one heard the distress call.

Apparently the distress call was indeed heard and a rescue was launched. From St. Lucia police detail rescue after boat sinking:


From the two articles it appears that the boat sank sometime in the late afternoon, in poor weather. As is usually the case, it took time to start the search. The search was suspended at dark and resumed the next day.

No one disputes that they would have been better off had they had gear such as a plb, flares, a strobe or flashlight, etc. However, the question in the original post was whether they made the right decision to swim for it rather than stay together where the boat sank. To repeat what I said upthread, people in the water are very hard to spot, but group of four people is much easier to spot than a group of two. Swimming for shore worked out for them in this case, but in my opinion they were very lucky they made it.

In most situations of this nature the best odds are to stay with the boat.

So if the swimmers would have stayed at the site of the sinking they would have been rescued after half an hour. That is how I understand it.

Didn't the article say they stayed near the SAR datum/sinking location an hour before swimming for St Lucia?
Remind me to bring my own bail-out kit if I ever go sport fishing in the Caribbean.

I wouldn't take any of the time lines quoted too literally. For the swimmers who "stayed near the SAR datum/sinking location an hour", this would be accurate only if they checked their watch and kept good notes. It is entirely possible that for those under stress it seemed like an hour, but it could easily have been much less. Likewise for the rescue, you are assuming that the authorities heard the Mayday call directly from the captain (not relayed via other boaters), and that there was no time lag to find an available boat and dispatch it to the location. We also shouldn't assume that a hurried Mayday location was entirely accurate, or that it didn't get garbled in transmission.

There is often a good deal of confusion in these situations.

Too true.

What were the currents doing while this situation developed? Tides can affect their location, along with the factors already mentioned, if you get my drift....

They did try to keep as a group of four. The captain and first mate agreed with the tourists to swim for shore, and they were still together, after swimming a while, when they saw the plane and helicopter (which didn't see them). Swimming may have caused them to separate quicker, or it may not.

Here's some rank speculation: it sounds like the tourists were better swimmers. They say they swam faster attempting to reach the search team, and that when they failed to reach it is also when they lost sight of the crew; so perhaps the crew couldn't keep up with that burst of speed. The tourists may have thought if they got themselves rescued, they could tell the search team where the other two were. (It's possible that the crew are refusing interviews because they don't interpret being abandoned as kindly.)

I agree separating was a mistake, although I see that as a different choice to deciding to leave the boat and swim for shore. For me that partly depends on how much of the boat was still above water, which I can't figure out from reports.

When they saw the plane and helicopter, that search team was between the swimmers and land. Perhaps even though they tried to stay in the same location, they'd drifted further from land. Either that or the search team was looking in the wrong location, which seems unlikely. Either way, the four of them were swimming towards the search team, not away from it. (I think it unlikely that there was an earlier search team, closer to the boat, which the tourists didn't notice.)

(There's slightly more information in a later interview on WRKR.