Diary entries from a couple who were left behind in shark-infested waters have been found.
Tom and Eileen Lonergan, an American couple, were exploring the world in January 1998 when they decided to board their scuba dive boat, Outer Edge, to explore a part of the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia.
The two had already done two 40-minute dives and were getting ready for a third at a place called Fish City, which is noted for having a lot of sharks.
But as they came back up, they saw that their dive boat was gone, leaving them stuck in the middle of the ocean.
The Daily Record says that the Lonergans, who met at Louisiana State University and worked with the US Peace Corps in Tuvalu and Fiji, lingered underwater much longer than they should have, and the crew’s safety checks missed them.
When the boat got back to Port Douglas that night, no one picked up their things, including their dive packs.
The staff didn’t realize their mistake until two days later, but by then it was too late.
After the couple went missing, their personal diaries were recovered in their Cairns hostel room. The things they wrote about gave us frightening clues about how they were thinking before they d!ed.
Tom wrote in his diary, “I feel like my life is over and I’m ready to d!e.” This strange entry, written six months before the pair went missing, went on to say, “From here, my life can only get worse.” It has reached its climax, and from now on, things will only get worse till my demise.
Eileen’s journal writings were just as scary. She wrote about how Tom didn’t care about de@th just 16 days before they went missing.
Tom wants to d!e quickly and without too much suffering, and he wants it to happen soon. Tom doesn’t want to kill himself, but he does want to d!e, and that could bring him to what he wants. She wrote that I could be caught up in that.
Rescue teams worked very hard, but they were never able to find the Lonergans’ bodies.
The 2003 movie Open Water was based on their sad story and showed a similar situation of being stuck in shark-infested waters.
To show how scared and panicked the couple would have been, real sharks were permitted to swim about the actors. Cameras were linked to buoys to give a terrifyingly near view. To keep the sharks away from the cast, bits of tuna were dropped into the water.