DIVE talks to Dr Sarah Martin, survivor of Egypt’s most deadly scuba diving liveaboard disaster about her escape and rescue after Sea Story capsized
In the early hours of the morning of 25 November 2024, the Dive Pro Liveaboard-owned Sea Story, carrying 46 passengers and crew, capsized.
Thirty-five people were eventually rescued during the chaotic 36 hours following the incident, but four bodies were pulled from the wrecked vessel and seven people are still missing, although any chance they might be found alive has long since vanished.
In the aftermath of what appears now to have been an entirely preventable disaster, brought about by mismanagement, incompetence and a failure to adhere to even basic safety protocols, the survivors have come together to share their stories in an attempt to force change in the Egyptian scuba diving industry, which has seen seven liveaboards lost – with at least 15 fatalities – in the last two years.
One of those rescued is Sarah Martin, a Lancaster-based doctor who has taken time out of her busy schedule to talk to DIVE Magazine on behalf of herself and her fellow survivors about the litany of issues that led up to the disaster, how she managed to escape the stricken vessel, and the subsequent attempt to cover up the worst of the details by the boat’s owners, and the Egyptian authorities.
Everything that follows has been corroborated by multiple witnesses and is – to the best of our knowledge – an accurate account of events as they unfolded. There’s so much to unpack from Sarah’s interview and information shared by other divers that this story will be spread across three separate articles.
A last-minute change of boat
The first inkling that problems may lie ahead was when some of the divers – Sarah included – were notified by booking agents Liveaboard.com of a change of boat from the vessel they had originally booked, another Dive Pro liveaboard named Tillis.
The change, said liveaboard.com, was due to a ‘last-minute cancellation on the Tillis and to meet their minimum booking requirements’. Sarah and the others would receive an ‘upgrade’ to a cabin on board Sea Story, and although the trip would end in Hurghada, not Port Ghalib as originally intended, they were promised that the itinerary would remain otherwise unchanged.
Boarding Sea Story on the afternoon of Saturday, 23 November, Sarah was struck by the lack of formal greeting and introduction to the boat and crew.
‘That was one of the things I found really strange,’ said Sarah, ‘because I’ve done two liveaboards before and every time you come on, you know who all the crew are; you get a tour of the boat.
‘We just kind of showed up and we’re all standing around, we didn’t really know what was going on, or who was in charge. We’re all sort of asking, what’s the plan? Who’s in charge here? Who works here? There’s just people around. I thought that was really strange. I still don’t even quite know who the captain is.’
The new arrivals were told that they were waiting for other guests to arrive, but nobody at this point seemed to know how many. Sarah describes the dive guides as ‘around’ but not ‘super present’ and nobody seemed to ‘take the lead’, leaving the guests unable to identify who was in charge.
Eventually, the divers were introduced to one of Dive Pro Liveaboard’s managers, Zizo, who was sitting in the cabin with his laptop ready to take payments for rental gear and additional charges such as port and national park fees.
The divers were informed they would be leaving port ‘sometime the next day’, depending on a check of the vessel and ‘paperwork’ (which is fairly standard procedure for Egyptian dive boats), but – importanly – there was no tour of the boat or safety briefing before the guests retired to their rooms for the evening.
The boat and safety briefing
The briefing was made the following morning by the head guide, Aladin, before Sea Story left port – but it was a stationary briefing, rather than a proper muster drill. It was professionally given and accompanied by a large-screen PowerPoint presentation, but still no tour of the boat, nor practice (or even demonstration) of how to don a life jacket, and – it would later turn out – vital information regarding safety procedures left unsaid.
‘It was a very fire-focussed briefing,’ Sarah said, ‘probably based on a previous incident. They told us things like: never charge your phones in your rooms, but at this point, everyone had already charged their phone in their room the night before because we hadn’t been told that.
‘He instructed guests not to lock the cabin doors so they could be accessed in an emergency, and they talked about, you know, if you hear an alarm, you need to come out of your room. They didn’t tell us where we were meeting or anything though, but they did tell us about the emergency exit on the lower deck, which we did end up using.
‘He also provided information about the life rafts, including that food and water would be available in them if needed,’ said Sarah – although it would later be discovered that the life rafts contained no food, no water, and very little in terms of emergency supplies.
‘I think it was a fairly comprehensive briefing, to be fair’ said Sarah, ‘just, not all of the information was accurate when it came to the actual emergency.’
The ‘previous incident’ of which Sarah speaks is the sinking of another Dive Pro vessel, Sea Legend, which caught fire in February 2024 resulting in the death of a German woman.
Getting underway but with a different itinerary
Shortly before Sea Story set sail, the guests were informed they would not be doing the ‘Deep South’ itinerary they had booked.
Instead, they would head north to Hurghada via Safaga after first sailing south to Sha’ab Sataya – also known as Dolphin Reef – where the boat was scheduled to arrive in the early hours of Monday morning after an overnight sailing.
The change to the schedule caused some discontent among the guests, as those who had been ‘upgraded’ from Tillis had been assured that the change of boat would not mean a change in itinerary.
The reason behind the change of itinerary is not clear. An email to the passengers from liveaboard.com, which DIVE has seen, said it was due to a last-minute cancellation taking Tillis under its minimum booking requirements.
However, while waiting in Port Ghalib, some of the divers now on Sea Story saw the crew of Tillis looking very much like they were preparing her for departure. Two of the divers on board Sea Story had even been transferred from Hurghada with people who said they would be boarding the supposedly cancelled liveaboard.
Sea Story eventually left port late in the morning of 24 November headed for Marsa Shouna, where the guests would make a check dive and then, after lunch, a night dive.
As the boat moored up at Marsa Shouna, some of the guests spotted that Tillis was already there, making them feel that ‘something a little fishy [was] going on’
Weather warnings and the replacement captain
One of the major sources of speculation as to the cause of the Sea Story tragedy is the weather warning issued by the Egyptian Meteorological Authority for 24 and 25 November advising against marine activities.
The extent of the warnings and how they might have affected sea conditions remains unclear, but Sea Story’s captain decided to set sail despite the inclement forecast.
According to a summary of the incident’s timeline that the group of survivors has put together, however, one of Sea Story’s dive guides – a Spanish woman by the name of Natalia – said that the skipper who made that decision was ‘not the usual captain’.
Further, Natalia said that the usual captain described Sea Story as ‘challenging to operate due to its height and size, requiring a high level of skill and experience,’ and was ‘known for his cautious approach to operating the vessel,’ often refusing to take the boat to areas where he ‘believed conditions presented a safety risk.’
He also reportedly advised that ‘any substitute captain should undergo at least one month of supervised training to safely operate the vessel.’
Why the usual captain was replaced is not known – but Sarah says Natalia told her that he had telephoned his replacement on the night of the incident and told him not to take Sea Story out in the unsafe conditions.
The call was debated between the dive guides and the crew, but in the end, the replacement captain decided they would set sail.
Sea conditions and an unbalanced ship
After the night dive and dinner, Sea Story headed south into the Red Sea, bound for Sha’ab Sataya. The divers were socialising on the boat’s third deck when sea conditions began to deteriorate.
‘I saw the crew lying the chairs down under the tables,’ says Sarah, ‘so thought, maybe they’re expecting it to get a bit rough. ‘We were out on deck having a few drinks and then it started to pick up a bit. It felt a bit rough, but nothing super unusual, but I started to ask questions of the crew when all the furniture started sliding back and forth, because that’s something I’ve never experienced.
‘These are big, heavy sofas and tables and things, and they were sliding back and forth, and we were sitting on them and sliding around the deck as well.
‘The way that the boat was rocking side to side, it was difficult to walk,’ Sarah continues. ‘At one point I tried to go down to my room, and you could walk a few steps but then you had to hold on to something, wait for the boat to rock, then walk a few more steps. And I guess that’s something I’ve never experienced, especially on a larger boat.’
As the sea conditions worsened, glasses smashed on the deck, rubbish bins fell over, and one of the guests came up to the deck to inform another that their camera gear was rolling around on the floor of their room, as cupboards in some of the cabins would not close properly.
It seems that Sea Story had become unstable, and her stability would likely have been further compromised by the heavy, unsecured furniture sliding around on deck, a major failure with regard to maritime safety protocols.
Adding to the growing list of those failures, as the guests were sliding around the deck, one of the two Zodiacs that serve as the liveaboard’s tenders came loose from its tether and slid off the dive platform. Sea Story slowed to a crawl.
‘Suddenly, people ran to the back, and we only had one of the Zodiacs where previously there had been two, and two crew members jumped into the other Zodiac,’ says Sarah. ‘They just had a small torch with them and we were thinking – that’s dangerous, this boat’s rocking that much. How are they going to manage in that little speed boat with just a torch?
‘Five or ten minutes later, they came back each in one Zodiac, and everyone was sort of cheering, and it was funny, I guess, at the time, but also watching them try to get that boat back onto the deck, I think everyone was a bit on edge because it didn’t look particularly safe, the way that they were doing it.’
At some point during the evening another guest, Justin Hodges, who was on deck trying to work on his laptop, asked one of the dive guides if the rough conditions were normal. Sarah had also asked a similar question, but both received little more than a shrug in reply.
While the sea conditions were clearly not ideal, Sarah also feels that there was a disconnect between the conditions and the instability of the boat.
‘It felt strange to me that it was that rough,’ she says, ‘especially given that – we’re skipping forward here – once the accident happened, the water wasn’t that bad – it didn’t seem to correlate with how unstable the boat was, with the actual waves and weather.’
Capsizing in near-total darkness
Sarah tells the story of the moment disaster struck:
‘I went to bed around midnight but I was struggling to sleep because of the motion. I remember looking at the time; it was about 2 am and I was getting a bit worried, because we were supposed to be up at 5.30 to dive, and I hadn’t really slept very much.
‘At that point, I also realised I’d been lying on my phone, so I put it on the bedside table. We’d been told not to sleep with earplugs or ear pods, but I really was struggling to sleep, and I was getting a bit nervous, so I put my ear pods in and my eye mask on because I thought I just needed to zone out and get a bit of sleep.
‘It was sometime between 2 and 3 am that the boat really sharply tilted to the right, and then to the left. I took my eye mask off, and I remember all the lights came on and flickered, and I saw everything fall out of the cupboards and then we tilted sharply to the right, and then the boat was just silent and completely dark.
‘I was sharing a room with Natalia, one of the dive guides, so I said to her I was a bit disoriented, a bit confused, and she said, “We need to get out of the room, let’s go.”
‘We tried to find the door, and we couldn’t find the door. I was looking for my phone, looking for the bedside table, but the bedside table wasn’t where it normally was.
‘We didn’t realize at this point we were already flipped 90 degrees on our side, so it took a minute or two; I sort of felt along one wall and realised the bedside table was on its side and upturned.
‘I managed to get that drawer open and get my phone out, turn the torch on, and that’s when we saw we were on our side. The door was now on the floor, which is why we couldn’t find it, because obviously we were looking on what we thought was the wall, and all of our belongings and everything had just fallen in front of the door.
‘I think I was very lucky. I just happened to put my phone in that bedside table an hour before, because I don’t know if we could have found where the door was and gotten out otherwise.
‘We moved all our things quickly, and we grabbed the two life jackets out of the cupboard, but it was difficult to open the door. We had to pull it up, but we managed to get it open after a couple of tries, and then we climbed out through the door, and there were already people making their way out of the boat, so we followed them.
‘It was all very disorienting and dark, but I think looking at the pictures of the boat, we climbed through the emergency exit into a crew room – I think it came out two decks up because we had to jump down into one room, at which point I injured my ankle, and then we had to get up over the side of the boat.
‘I remember there was a railing there, and there were people holding on to this railing, and I was struggling to get up because it was quite high and you needed to pull yourself up. Two guys – one of the Egyptian dive guides, and Justin, one of the other guests – lifted me and helped me out.
‘At that point, I gave my phone to someone, but it was lost while I had to pull myself out. I didn’t have my phone any more, and then I just got in the water, and we saw the boat was going down.
‘It was going down fast, so our initial reaction was to swim away from the boat. I didn’t know very much about what to do in a shipwreck – I guess it might have been better to stay near it, but I just had the image from [the movie] Titanic in my head, to get away from this boat.
‘There was debris everywhere, things falling off the top because it was tilted, so I swam out a bit, and I called out to see who was around me. [There were two others], but only Natalia and I had life vests,’ so we sort of held hands and stayed together, and we swam away from the boat a bit.
‘We found the dive guide who’d helped me, holding on to a buoy, and we thought that’s good. You know, we’ll find it easier if we stay with this thing. He said he was injured – he thought he’d broken his ribs – and couldn’t swim, so we said we’d just wait with him there.
‘I think initially we thought the rescue would come quite quickly, within an hour or something like that. So we thought – we’ll stay here, they’ll be able to find us if we hold onto this thing.’
Picked up and drifting
It is worth mentioning that the next few hours may have been made easier for some of those who had escaped the capsized boat if they had been briefed to stay with it – others who had done so were picked up sooner.
The order to abandon ship is a last resort; if it still floats and there is no danger from fire or falling debris, then it’s worth hanging onto and – as opposed to popular belief and Hollywood mythology – sinking ships do not pull people who have escaped the interior down with them.
Rescue didn’t come quickly. The four divers and their injured guide spent some time clinging to the buoy before it became apparent that they were drifting away from the boat, and they felt they should be closer to the wreck; otherwise, they wouldn’t be found.
It was virtually pitch black; just a crescent moon lighting the darkness, and neither of the two life jackets shared between the five survivors had working lights.
Sea Story’s inverted hull was just a silhouette in the water as the group attempted to swim back towards it without exhausting themselves or becoming separated. They didn’t make much progress but weren’t being pushed any further away, either, when Natalia – whom Sarah describes as a ‘very, very strong swimmer’ – heard the sound of a Zodiac’s engine and suggested she head back to the boat in search of help.
‘When Natalia tells the story,’ says Sarah, ‘she says reaching the boat was the scariest part for her, because when she got there, she didn’t see anyone, she didn’t hear anything, she thought she was on her own, and she didn’t know if she’d be able to find us again.’
At this point, Sarah says Natalia heard shouting from inside the boat and swam around it, banging on the windows before locating Mathias and Danilo, two German divers trapped in their cabin. Natalia tried to use pieces of debris to smash their window but without success, when the crew drove up behind her in the Zodiac.
The crew pulled Natalia onto the small boat, but she said they were unwilling to help her break Mathias and Danilo from the cabin, insisting they must leave quickly. She asked if they at least help the small group that she knew was nearby, and although Natalia said that the crew at first seemed reluctant, when she mentioned that the Egyptian dive guide was with them, the pilot of the Zodiac overruled his colleagues and went to pick them up.
Mathias and Danilo would eventually find their way out of the cabin and were later rescued. Meanwhile, a Belgian couple and an Egyptian dive guide remained trapped in an air pocket inside the upturned vessel, and unknown to Sarah at this point, another group of survivors had already been picked up and put onto a second life raft – but their ordeals were far from over.
‘The crew came and got us, and they put us in the Zodiac, and then they couldn’t start the motor again,’ says Sarah. ‘I guess it was damaged, and it wouldn’t turn on. They tried several times, and I think the fuel was leaking as well, because there was a very strong smell of petrol and the backs of my legs were burning like anything. It was really painful.
‘They kept trying to start the motor without any luck, and then were trying to bail out the water with our hands, or whatever we could find – there were a couple of dive fins in there as well that we were trying to use.
‘Just then, I think we saw a flare – we were looking and we saw this figure, and we didn’t know what it was at first. Natalia said we needed to paddle over to it, so we tried to paddle with our hands, with the fins, whatever we could find, and then Natalia said, oh, that’s the life raft for 25 people.’
The group reached the life raft to find the captain already inside, wrapped ‘up to the chin’ in an emergency blanket, of which there were only two more for the group of survivors to share among themselves.
Despite the food and water promised in the briefing, none was present in the life raft, just a rudimentary first aid kit with a couple of bandages and a box of paracetamol; a spare sea anchor, a life ring, a bailer and sponge, foot pump, a signalling mirror, a fishing kit, and a torch with no batteries.
Still under the cover of darkness, the group of survivors spent their energy keeping warm, most of them vomiting with seasickness, and nothing to see but water.
One oddity Sarah spotted during the rescue was that, despite the speed at which Sea Story overturned, the crew members that picked her up were still dry.
‘They’d obviously stayed dry before the boat went over,’ said Sarah. ‘They must have been out on deck or something when it happened and jumped in the zodiac.
‘I don’t know how they managed it, but they were dry. They had cigarettes. They were smoking.’
The survivors estimate they reached the life raft approximately two hours after Sea Story capsized, having spent much of that in the water. The four divers and the Egyptian dive guide were now adrift with seven crew members and the replacement captain.
It would be another six hours before they were found.
The second part of the survivors’ account of their rescue will continue in Part 2…
