On January 25, 1998, American tourists Tom and Eileen Lonergan boarded a dive boat in Queensland for a day out exploring the Great Barrier Reef.
The married couple from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, had stopped off in Australia on their way home from Fiji and Tuvalu, where they had been serving in the Peace Corps for three years.
Eileen, 28, was an experienced scuba diver, and had encouraged Tom, 34, to take up the hobby as well.
They were excited to dive the world's largest coral reef system.
WATCH: The trailer for Open Water.
Outer Edge had 26 passengers on board that day, and the boat's skipper Geoffrey Nairn took them 60km off the coast for their adventure in the Coral Sea.
After three dives at St. Crispin Reef, the boat's crew conducted a head count of passengers onboard the vessel, before heading back to the mainland.
Two days later, on January 27, a bag containing the passports and belongings of Tom and Eileen was found on the dive boat.
It can only be surmised that the young couple would have resurfaced from their final 3pm dive, after being underwater for less than an hour, to find the boat that had brought them there was gone.
48 hours after the couple went missing, a wide scale air and sea search was quickly organised, with everyone from Navy to civilians taking part.
But the couple - who would have been faced with the Queensland summer heat, no fresh water, and the depths and dangers of the open ocean - were never found.
ReturnT0Sender on June 6th, 2021 at 13:20 UTC »
Like 10-12 years ago, I go out fishing with my dad (key largo).
We fish most of the day but then a big ugly storm pops up. We pick up our lines and head out. As we are heading out we notice a diver waving his arms. No dive boat in sight. We pick the guy up and he's as white as a ghost exhausted, still with all his gear on.
We give him water and ask him questions, he told us the name of the charter he was on. My dad got on the radio to try to find the dive boat.
The dive boat answered and we met up with it. It was so windy and ugly from the storm that the dive boat couldn't get close. The captain of the dive boat told us to tell the guy to get back into the water and they'd get him.
Dude said "hell no" and ended up coming back with us to land.
i_drink_wd40 on June 6th, 2021 at 12:39 UTC »
I chaperoned a trip for my cousin at an amusement park and was in charge of 8 middle school aged kids. I started the day by taking a picture of my group and memorizing their names. Throughout the day I kept counting all of them. I have never counted to eight so many times as I did that day.
locks_are_paranoid on June 6th, 2021 at 05:43 UTC »
After this incident, most dive boats switched to reading people's names instead of just doing a head count.