INTO THE BLUE:

Dying at Sea. Probably. (TONY HORWITZ, 8/01/04, NY Times)

IN "Open Water," a vacationing couple surfaces from a scuba dive to find their tour boat has vanished. Left for hours amid circling sharks, one of the divers finally vents his rage at having been abandoned. "Unbelievable!" he screams.

Actually, it's not. The movie is loosely based on a real event: the 1998 stranding of two Americans off Australia's Great Barrier Reef. The filmmakers, both New Yorkers, are divers themselves and learned of the incident from a scuba newsletter. They borrowed the premise of an abandoned couple, but fictionalized the rest, in part because the true story had too many twists to seem credible on screen. "People watching would think, `There's no way this could happen, it's absurd,' " says Chris Kentis, who made the film with his wife, Laura Lau.

The real-life couple, Thomas and Eileen Lonergan, traveled to Australia after three years as Peace Corps teachers on the islands of Fiji and Tuvalu. Thomas was 33, Eileen 28; both were experienced divers. Australia was the first stop of a planned round-the-world trip before returning home to Louisiana.

Early on Jan. 25, 1998, the Lonergans rode a shuttle bus to a marina in Port Douglas, Queensland, where a company called Outer Edge Dive carried them and 24 others to the rim of the Great Barrier Reef, 40 miles offshore. The day's last dive was at a coral formation called "Fish City" because of its abundant marine life. While others followed a dive master, the Lonergans toured the site on their own.

At the end of the 40-minute dive, the crew was supposed to log each person's dive and count heads before the boat left. But several crew members were inexperienced and uncertain of their responsibilities. Amid this confusion, the Lonergans' dives weren't recorded and the head count was botched. The captain, believing he had all passengers aboard, motored back to Port Douglas.

After the passengers disembarked, a crew member found a dive bag and shoes, but assumed someone had left them by accident and would return to the dock to claim them. A shuttle bus driver called Outer Edge to say that two people hadn't shown up for the return trip to their hostel. This didn't set off alarms, either; perhaps the pair had made their own way back. Two days later, the Outer Edge skipper noticed the dive bag still unclaimed; inside it he found Mr. Lonergan's wallet. A call to their hostel revealed that the two had never returned. It was only then, more than 48 hours after the Lonergans' dive at Fish City, that the police finally learned the couple were missing. A weeklong search of the reef by air and sea failed to turn up any sign of them. The Lonergans were presumed to have drowned or been killed by tiger sharks, a fierce tropical species.

Then a series of strange discoveries raised doubts about the couple's fate.

It's a story that just gets more fascinating as he goes along.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 4, 2004 4:10 PM