Three British divers are missing, feared dead after disappearing in treacherous waters off the coast of a remote Indonesian island.

ALAMY

Komodo National Park, Indonesia: the area is notorious for its strong currents

Charlotte Allin, 24, her boyfriend Jim Manning and Kathleen Mitchinson, their diving instructor, were last seen on Thursday during a dive off Tawa Besar island, inside the Komodo National Park, which is notorious for strong “washing machine” currents.

Two other divers, from Sweden and France, are also feared to have died.

Miss Mitchinson’s Scottish-born husband, Ernest Lewandowski, was leading another diving party nearby and raised the alarm after finding no sign of his wife’s group when he surfaced.

As he continued to search for the party 36 hours after they vanished, Mr Lewandowski, who was joined by rescuers from the Indonesian police and navy, said: “Time is critical. It’s absolutely blistering hot out there. There were three boats out today searching. I was on a speedboat going around all the beaches and everything to see if they had washed up.”

The search of the area was called off at 3am local time and resumed at dawn on Friday. “It’s a new moon so it’s very dark out there,” said Mr Lewandowski, who runs a turtle sanctuary and diving school with his wife on Flores, 250 miles east of Bali.

Miss Allin, from Bideford in Devon, had been living with Mr Manning in Phuket, Thailand, where they both worked at a diving school. They were on holiday at the time of the accident.

Miss Allin’s parents David and Sue and her sisters Jessica and Sarah-Jane were too upset to talk about their daughter last night, but Maureen Poole, a former neighbour from Frithelstockstone, where the family lived until two years ago, said: “Everyone here who knows Charlotte is devastated.

“I have spoken to her uncle who is very upset. The family are all still hoping for good news.”

Mr Lewandowski and his wife have owned and run the Reefseekers Dive Centre for the past 15 years, after Mr Lewandowski retired from his job as a commercial diver, repairing oil rigs in the North Sea.

He did not give details of the type of dive the group was undertaking, saying only that his group had been underwater for an hour when he surfaced.

But the centre advertises highly specialised diving courses on its website, including drift diving and deep diving which, it says, will enable participants to experience narcosis, a state similar to drunkenness which occurs at depths below 30 metres and which can cause death.

A local diver called Nordin who works for Reefseekers said: “It was a very strong current, going from north to south, so it may be that the divers have been swept out a long way and the local boat didn’t find them because it’s too far. It’s also possible that they’ve been trapped in the eddies at the end of the island.

“At the end of the island there is a meeting current which creates turbulence and I have a big worry that the people got into trouble because of the turbulence. It’s a washing machine current.”

Nordin, who only has one name, said all five divers were experienced, with a minimum of 20 dives each, but added: “There is a strong current in the national park when there is a new moon. When the accident happened it was low tide and very, very strong.”

He said Mr Lewandowski had conducted an initial search before help arrived from Labuhanbajo, where the dive centre is based, a 40 minute speedboat ride away.

Tourists flock to the Komodo National Park from all over the world, not only to see the famous Komodo dragons, the world’s biggest lizard, but also to dive in the spectacular coral reefs, which are home to a quarter of the world’s known marine species.

The Reefseekers website offers a variety of scuba diving courses from beginner level to training people to be professional instructors. Among the speciality courses is “Deep diving – what is narcosis and what does it feel like?”

It adds: “With 15 years experience of providing a personalised, first class service to both divers and student divers, Kath and Ernest invite you to taste the diving off the west coast of Flores (which) rivals the world’s best.”

The other two missing divers are Swede Helena Naradainen and Lauren Pinel from France.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk