Without their powerless support boat, two divers found themselves alone in the North Sea ...

The crew of the Humber lifeboat had just returned from a training exercise when they received the alert at 11.50am on Sunday 23 March.

A 7m dive boat, with two crew onboard and two scuba divers, had broken down with fuel problems. Unable to find anchorage, they drifted 9 miles east of Withernsea, away from the two scuba divers. The crew soon lost sight of the divers’ surface marker, indicating where the divers were below the surface. The men reacted quickly and called the Coastguard by VHF radio.

Lifeboats from both Humber and Withernsea launched immediately. They were mainly concerned for the divers, who would be stranded in the swell.

The crew of the Humber Severn class lifeboat Pride of the Humber used the dive boat’s VHF signal to locate the vessel using onboard direction finding equipment.

Meanwhile, the two divers resurfaced from their dive to find that they suddenly had no support boat, and no idea of what had happened. ‘They had no reference to where they were,’ explains Humber Crew Member Ben Mitchell.

Humber Coxswain Dave Steenvoorden used the information that the dive boat crew had given him, and his experience, to calculate a search area to find the divers’ likely position in the water.

It was important to find the divers quickly to ensure their safety, as Ben explains: ‘The longer time that elapses when someone’s in the open water, the more likely it is we will have to employ major search patterns and a longer, more complicated rescue.’

‘Within a short amount of time, the area we calculated for the search would get bigger very quickly,’ agreed Dave.

His lifeboat crew looked out from the deck for the inflatable surface marker. The marker was a red inflatable around 1m tall, and this bright visual enabled the lifeboat crew to locate the two men from a distance, and pluck them safely out of the sea.

Dave explained that divers can be difficult to spot even in the best of conditions: ‘It was a beautiful clear day with a 1.5m swell but, without the marker, all the divers have above the water is their heads, and any boat in a metre of sea would struggle to see them.

‘They made our job easier,’ adds Dave. ‘The equipment the divers carried ensured a quick and successful rescue. The VHF and surface markers really were lifesavers. The divers also had a hand-held VHF and could have set off an emergency beacon if we hadn’t found them.’

Both divers, boat crew and the stricken vessel were rescued by the Pride of the Humber crew and handed over to Withernsea’s inshore lifeboat. The Withernsea crew took them into the beach, shaken, but unharmed. ‘It could have been a serious incident,’ reflected Steve Medcalf of the Withernsea crew. ‘The divers were very grateful to get back to the beach.’