Refugees

On the last night of our dive trip we were on the deck enjoying dinner when Curtis exclaimed "There's a flare!". We all watched the flare on the horizon but there wasn't a huge amount of concern. About 15 minutes later another flare went up. This time the captain radioed the coast guard and we found out that a fishing boat had sunk, but that someone was on the way to pick up the people. We didn't hear much more about it. The next morning, we were back in the water for the last two dives of our trip. After the second dive, we came on board to find unfamiliar faces. Then we learned the whole story. It was a small fishing charter that had sunk. It went down very fast, so the guys aboard didn't have a chance to grab anything, just get on the life raft. One guy happened to have his camera which happened to be in an underwater case, so he has proof it all happened. They spent the night on one of the islands, and, since our boat was going back the next day, our captain agreed to take them back to the mainland. So much irony... Curtis had been reading a book on wreck diving that was in our boat's library, so he handed the book over to the guys for a laugh. They said they hadn't really caught much - making me all the more glad I'm a diver! Why stay in a hot boat waiting to hopefully catch a fish, when you can go down in the refreshing water and see all the fish you want??? Of course, they do get to drink more beer - no drinking and diving. After chatting with them a bit, we found out they were software engineers. Curtis naturally offered to try and recruit them and offered his card. He was just imaging filling out the referral form. "How do you know this person?" "I was on the boat that rescued him from a shipwreck."