Bali Post reports that 35 foreign tourists and 5 local tourists had a close call with fate on Friday, January 2, 2009, when the fast ferry boat carrying them from Gili Trawangan (near Lombok) to Serangan Island at Bali sunk just miles of Bali’s coast. The Lian Sengiggi lost power and started taking on water near the Watu Klotok Temple in the Klungkung Regency.
Using life preservers the crew and passengers abandoned ship and made it to shore, some with the help of local fishermen who came to their assistance. The passengers and crew were brought to the Mapolsek police station to make statements necessary to authorities in their investigations. According to Bali Post, a number of passengers rescued from the sea were not listed on the formal official manifest sent from Gili Trawangan, suggesting the ship was not in compliance with shipping rules.
The ship reportedly left Gili Trawangan at 12 noon and, after two hours into its journey, lost power and began to take on water. The ship quickly sank and the passengers, jumped into the sea where they held onto each other, forming three separate groups. Two of the groups managed to swim to shore at Jumpai, while the third group was carried by strong current to Kusamba beach where local fishing boats came to their rescue.
The ship’s captain, Agus Purnomo, refused to comment to the press on the circumstances surrounding the loss of his ship, saying, “Frankly, I panicked. I can’t explain anything. What’s clear, the water suddenly rushed in. I don’t remember anything more.” The ship carried a crew of 4 with the 40 tourists hailing from Indonesia, Sweden, Australia, Switzerland, Great Britain and Germany.
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Hello,
My name is Jamie Nichols and I was one of the passengers aboard the Lian Senggigi Express. Although your story is the most accurate I’ve read there are still some details that aren’t true and that haven’t been told. Below is my account of what happened. If you need confirmation of my story I have the e-mail addresses of 28 of the other passengers who I’m sure would be willing to confirm my story. Thanks:
We left Gili Trawangan approximately 11:30am on Friday January 2nd, 2009. The boat ride was supposed to be two hours based on the roughness of the water. Our driver was driving the boat very fast, too fast for the conditions we were traveling in. We continually hit big waves and the boat would fly in the air and crash back down. After one particularly large wave the boat came down and made a loud cracking type of sound. We [the passengers on the boat] all kind of made a ‘whoa’ comment and looked around at each other but the driver continued to drive just as fast.
By about 2:00pm the boat started to slow down and by about 2:15pm some the passengers asked the crew how much longer the trip would be and they continually said ‘10 minutes’. At this point one of the crew members went to the front of the boat and got out a bucket and another crew member went along the side of the boat up to the driver to report whatever was happening in the back of the boat. None of the passengers were informed of what was going on. The boat began to slow
down even more and then began to tilt to one side. Again we were all looking around for some information from the crew and the driver just asked all of us sitting on one side of the boat to move to the other side to stop the boat from tilting over. At this point all the engines stopped (whether or not the boat was turned off by the driver was unclear, but the boat was in an idle position with the some of the motors (there were four attached to the back of the boat) still running) and then another crew member came inside the cabin area and told us to put life jackets on but again said nothing about what was happening.
A few people started to stand up and the crew members just told us to sit back down. Now water was beginning to come in through the floor and we all waited for maybe five minutes and an older Australian gentlemen suggested that some of us jump off the boat because there was obviously too much weight on the boat and we worried about our luggage getting wet. Everyone agreed this was a good idea. So we all ignored the crew members and made our way outside the boat.
The water was continuing to pour into the boat through the back, which was slowly sinking, and through the bottom of the boat. Passengers began climbing on the roof of the boat. By the time I got to the side of the boat the waves were crashing up against my waist and everyone decided we were going to have to untie the buoy/life preserves from the top of the boat. Once they were untied everyone jumped in the water and held on. The boat was completely submerged underwater within a few minutes. I would estimate that the time from when we
stopped and put our life jackets on to the time the boat was
completely under water was about 10 minutes max. I cannot stress enough the lack of emergency planning or ability to think ahead that came from our crew members. If it weren’t for the initiative of the passengers on the boat we all would have drowned. There was one woman who was locked inside the cabin by the crew members. They shut and locked the door and jumped in the water without checking to make sure everyone was out safely. Nor did they do any sort of head count (not that it would have mattered because quite a few of us weren’t on the list of passengers). The only reason she escaped from the boat was because another passenger
saw her stuck inside and pulled her through a window while the boat was sinking.
Once everyone was out of the boat the crew told us they had called a rescue boat. We waited for about 10 minutes and no one came. (It was obvious no one was coming to help us.) One group of passengers was pulled out to sea by the current and we were no longer able to see them. Some other passengers swam to the shore. I was hanging on to one of the life preservers with several other passengers. A few people were crying and some were frozen in shock. Some were scared
because they couldn’t swim. We were all given life jackets. However, there weren’t enough for everyone and some of the crew went without and some were full of sand and some wouldn’t zip up. A few of us decided that we needed to swim to shore and so we positioned ourselves around the buoy so we could kick and pull. We kicked and pulled and swam for over an hour and eventually reached the shore. While we were
stuck out in the sea I could see some people on the shore I began to blow the whistle attached to my life vest and wave but still no one came to rescue us. When we got closer to shore a passenger that had already swum to shore jumped back in and helped us pull the buoy in. The other group of passengers that had drifted out to sea was picked up by some local fishermen and brought to shore as well.
What occurred once we got onto the beach I could write about for five more pages but to sum it up - The crew members tried to shuffle us all into cars to take us to hotels. We refused and said we wanted the police called. They first tried to pretend that a local security guard was a police officer which no one believed and demanded they call the police. An hour later the local police showed up and after standing around for about another 30 minutes took us all to the local station where we
waited for another hour or so only to be informed that we would have to travel another 1 hour and 20 minutes to the head police station were they could file a report of what happened. So we went to the main police station in Denpasar and all hand-wrote our account of what happened and made a list of everything we lost and the estimated cost. We were then taken to a hotel and had to return to the police station the following morning to sign the reports the police had typed up. This took a few hours and the police conveniently left out of the official report everyone’s reason for the boat sinking which was ‘reckless driving and a complete lack of emergency or back up plan by the crew members’. They said the boat went down do to engine failure. I’m sorry but boats don’t sink because an engine is not on, if that were the case any boat that is docked and not running would sink. The fact that the newspapers took this cover-up story and ran with it is ridiculous.
On our tickets it stated ‘insurance covered’ so I thought there was a chance I would get some reimbursement for the approximate $12,000 of stuff my fiancé and I lost. Instead the boat company said the insurance was for life and injury
only and they would not take responsibility for all of our lost
things. They agreed to pay for a flight home which we had missed and to put us up in a hotel until we left. After hours of crying, arguing, threatening and screaming they gave my fiancé and I 3 million Rupiah each (approximately $300).
As you can imagine many of us are still quite upset and are looking into taking legal action against the company. I wrote this to you because I would like the real story to be printed and known. This company has done quite a lot to cover up the truth. Whether they paid the police and newspapers off I don’t know. But what I do know is that the police reports that were typed up didn’t not state the same facts that all the passengers wrote down on their handwritten reports and what the newspapers are printing is not true either. In fact one
Bali paper said the Indonesian Navy rescued us.
I just want people to know that this was a completely avoidable
situation, if the driver had just slowed down this wouldn’t have
happened. If the boat went straight to shore the moment they knew something was wrong instead of continuing out to sea this wouldn’t have happened.
Although I’m completely unsatisfied with the way we were treated and I’m not done pursuing this issue personally, I’m just glad that the passengers on board were level headed enough and had enough common sense to get us all off the boat safely. And thank God there were no children or babies aboard because I doubt this story would have turned out the same if babies and children were strained in the middle of the
ocean with no life jackets and no boat coming to rescue them. This story could have ended a lot more tragically then it did and I’m grateful it didn’t but people also needed to be aware of what could happen while travelling in Indonesia.