EDITOR’S NOTE: Great Escapes is a series about how sometimes travel doesn’t go as planned — and what happens next.
One moment, Alexandra Alves Gaspar was deep-sea diving, marveling at a vertical reef wall in the Red Sea populated by colorful coral and vibrant marine wildlife.
The next, a powerful current suddenly swept her and her diving group away.
“We were dragged in seven, eight minutes,” Alexandra tells CNN Travel today. “A current so strong it caught us by surprise.”
It was August 2004. Alexandra, a 29-year-old lawyer on vacation with close friends from her native Portugal, was a diving fanatic. And this was supposed to be a trip of a lifetime.
When the current first took hold, neither Alexandra nor her friends panicked immediately. They stayed underwater a little while longer before heading to the surface.
“We aborted the dive and surfaced,” she recalls. “But that’s when I saw the boat — tiny, almost toy-like in the distance. We were already more than a mile away.”
And so began what Alexandra calls a “13-hour survival ordeal.”
Alexandra had fallen in love with diving a few years earlier, She loved the feeling of being underwater — the sense of adventure, freedom and tranquility.
“The sensation of the absence of gravity is like flying,” she says.
Soon, Alexandra, who was based in Lisbon and working for a bank, was planning all her vacations around diving. That passion led her to book a luxury liveaboard dive vessel called the Oyster, operated by a local tour company, in the Red Sea.
The Oyster sailed 10 hours to reach the waters around the El Ikhwa Islands, also known as the Al-Akhawayn Islands or the Brothers Islands, off the coast of Egypt. Famed for their spectacular scuba conditions, sharks and shipwrecks, these volcanic islands are also notorious for unpredictable currents.
“If you like the ocean and diving, it’s a great experience,” says Alexandra of her time on the Oyster. She and her friends ate and slept on the boat, in between daily explorations beneath the waves. “It’s easier to reach the diving spots, the best ones. This trip to the Red Sea was my first liveaboard experience. It was a dream trip.”
The first couple of days were dreamy. The third was when things went awry.
The passengers disembarked from the Oyster into two smaller, semi-rigid boats to get to the diving site.
“It was windy that day, and the sea was quite rough from the wind,” recalls Alexandra.
Once she was in the blue expanse of the water, Alexandra was focused on the kaleidoscope of coral, until the dive master tapped his air tank to get the group’s attention. He was gesturing to what looked like a shark up ahead. And then things started to unravel.
“We moved away from the wall to see it, but the current was extremely strong and carried us away,” she says.
The group lost sight of the coral wall. When they surfaced, they faced the chilling reality of how far they had drifted.
The stranded group included Alexandra, her four Portuguese friends, five British divers and a Belgian couple.
At first, the 12-strong group was united in their focus on being rescued, attempting to attract the attention of passing ships.
“Now, when you dive in remote places like in the Red Sea, you have a GPS incorporated,” explains Alexandra.
But in 2004, tracking technology was limited. The divers knew it would take time for the boat crew to realize they were missing and mount a search and rescue mission.
Realizing they were drifting further from their starting point, the group removed the lead weights from their belts and tied themselves together in a circle, relying on inflatable buoyancy aids to stay afloat.
They focused on the horizon, desperately trying to spot passing ships that could save them.
“We were screaming, we were 100% focused on seeing boats,” Alexandra recalls.
But as time passed, this energy exertion felt increasingly pointless. Emotions ebbed and flowed.
Hoping to capture marine wildlife, several divers had brought cameras. “One of the British divers after a few hours, said, ‘I should record this. Because we will not survive, but at least someone might find the camera,’” Alexandra recalls.
When he said those words, some of the divers started to panic. Alexandra began to cry.
“This was unbelievable,” she says. “Of course, I knew the possibility of being rescued after so many hours is almost none, but you still have the hope…”
“This was unbelievable. Of course, I knew the possibility of being rescued after so many hours is almost none, but you still have the hope…”
Alexandra Alves Gaspar
Others deflected fear with levity. “I was surrounded, on my left, by my Portuguese friend,” recalls Alexandra. “On my right was a British man — and the British have an amazing sense of humor. I remember it got to around five or six o’clock, and one of us was talking about what you regret in life, what you still want to do with your life … And he said, ‘The only thing I regret right now is missing my gin and tonic time.’”
Moments of profound connection also pierced through the terror. Another British diver asked their partner to get married if they survived. The answer was an enthusiastic yes.
As the hours ticked by, the sound of planes overhead raised hopes, but then offered crushing reminders of their invisibility.
“In the ocean, in the middle of nowhere with waves and wind, it’s impossible to see,” says Alexandra.
When the sun disappeared, so did Alexandra’s hope, though she remained struck by the beauty of the cloudless night that followed.
“I saw the most amazing starlight sky on top of me, full of stars. It’s a beautiful evening. It was a beautiful sunset,” Alexandra recalls. “But believe me, I thought that it was the last one I’d see.”
As darkness descended, the divers abandoned their earlier morale-lifting conversations and songs, falling silent to preserve energy. They switched from a circle into a V-shaped formation.
“We floated for hours, speaking very little,” recalls Alexandra. “The hardest part was the exhaustion and the certainty — calm but absolute — that this would likely end badly.”
Sunburn from the hours spent in the blazing heat, dehydration and fatigue all began to set in. As did the lingering dread about what lurked in the dark water beneath them.
“We inflated our vests to be on the surface, but your legs are still suspended underwater, and you could be attacked,” says Alexandra. “You imagine a lot of things.”
Today, Alexandra’s recollection of the darkest hours is hazy — a protective mechanism, she believes.
“I think this is my memory, or my imagination, covering it with a beautiful layer to eliminate the stress,” she says. “Because, of course, I was very afraid, I was stressed. I cried a lot during those hours … It was a mix between panic, stress and patience.”
After hours in complete darkness, Alexandra spotted what looked like lights flickering indistinctly on the horizon.
She turned to one of her friends to confirm she wasn’t imagining them. “I said, ‘Can you see the lights? I’m seeing a red light, yellow light, blue…’ And he said, ‘Yes, I can see a light.’ It was far in the distance.”
Two divers pulled out small flashlights and began to signal bursts of bright light toward the horizon.
“Three small clicks, three long clicks — the SOS code,” explains Alexandra.
In the distance, a boat returned the signal, followed by a blast of its horn.
The boat was part of an extensive search party that had been searching for the lost divers for hours.
“There were many vessels involved in the search and an alert had been sent to vessels throughout the surrounding Red Sea area,” explains Alexandra. “But the rescue felt like a miracle.”
It was also chaotic and surreal.
“They were pushing me out of the water and they were crying,” says Alexandra of her rescuers. “Two of them, they spoke a bit of English, and they were saying, ‘Allah, the dolphins.’ They were crying, they were very happy.”
All the divers were rescued and pulled onto boats and wrapped in blankets. Reports from the time suggest Egyptian naval vessels and other diving boats played a key role, but Alexandra credits the rescue to local fishermen.
“The captain said he heard on the radio that some divers were missing in that spot,” she says. “He was fishing close to the spot. He was the type of man who navigates with the stars, he doesn’t use instruments — no compass, no nothing.
“So, based on his instinct or intuition, he just turned off the engine, and he let the boat get dragged with the current … Afterwards, the fishermen told us, very emotionally, that dolphins had appeared around the bow of their vessel, behaving as though they were trying to draw their attention to something and lead them in a particular direction — towards where we were eventually found.”
They’d been rescued miles away from where their dive had begun.
“Of course, I cannot confirm that this is what the dolphins were doing,” says Alexandra. “I only know what the fishermen told us. But the story has stayed with me ever since.”
Alexandra says it took a few hours for the group to reach the Oyster.
“I remember speaking with my parents on the satellite phone a few hours after that, and then I remember seeing a doctor, because all my face was burned — and when I say burned, seriously burned,” Alexandra says.
“We were seriously dehydrated, but everyone was okay, everyone was healthy and okay.”
Alexandra’s main thought, as the doctor treated her sunburn, was: “I want to dive again.”
This might sound bizarre, given everything she’d just endured. But Alexandra was itching to return to the deep sea.
“I thought, ‘I want to dive again, because if I don’t dive again, I will never dive again in my life,’” she says. “You are traumatized. But I attributed blame not to myself, or the group, or the diving itself but the circumstances … The current was really, really strong. The winds were really, really strong.”
The group was offered the option to return home right away, but they unanimously voted to continue their vacation. For the remainder of the trip, and the journey home to Portugal, Alexandra remained in a state of almost euphoric relief.
“I remember the first meal, it was superb,” she says. “I was so happy to be rescued, to be alive. I was so happy and so lucky … I felt like, ‘I’m untouchable. Nothing can happen to me. Nothing can happen to me anymore.’”
She was struck by beauty in everything. Even as the divers were called to give testimony before the head of Egypt’s Red Sea Governate as part of the official investigation into the incident, Alexandra’s spirits couldn’t be dampened.
Then, when she landed back in Portugal, the airport was swarming with reporters. She learned their story had been reported internationally, with much global interest. Alexandra says many of these initial media reports were inaccurate, some claiming they were lost for 48 hours or surrounded by sharks.
The sudden media attention was overwhelming, as were the conflicting emotions — gratitude, anger, confusion and anxiety — she felt in the aftermath. Therapy helped her cope.
“I remember dreaming about it for almost two years, in a very bad way, nightmares,” says Alexandra of the incident. “But I went to therapy, and I remember the psychiatrist telling me that this was the trauma being digested. The post-traumatic stress of an event like that somehow appears in nightmares — that’s the way that your internal mechanisms can cope.”
Over time, Alexandra lost touch with her diving friends, but she did hear that the couple who promised to get married followed through, which made her smile.
While Alexandra returned to diving shortly after the incident, determined not to let the accident change how she felt about her favorite hobby, it took her longer to return to the Red Sea.
But in 2024, Alexandra found herself in the same waters where she’d fought for her life 20 years previously.
As soon as Alexandra descended into the depths, she was surrounded by a pod of dolphins. She couldn’t believe it.
“I kid you not,” says Alexandra today.
She blinked back tears as she thought about the dolphins that she believed played an important role in her rescue, over two decades before.
“They were playing by me for more than 45 minutes,” says Alexandra. “I look at this and I think, ‘If this is not a miracle, I don’t know what is.’ I swam with the dolphins and I said, ‘20 years later, this story is closed.’”
Today, Alexandra is reassured by the improved diving safety measures and technological advances, including the ability to dive with a GPS tracker and smartphone.
But she is still acutely aware of the unpredictability of nature, and that accidents can happen.
“You are not in control when you are in the elements,” she says. “In the ocean, you don’t control the currents. Even if you are an experienced diver or sailor — you know the currents, and you know the wind, but you don’t control them. And things can happen.”
Despite the risk, today Alexandra says about 75% of her global travel revolves around scuba diving. Her partner is an open water swimmer, and the two love going on aquatic vacations across the globe.
“I don’t want to discourage people from diving,” Alexandra says. “Quite the opposite … It’s a beautiful world. The fish are beautiful. The corals are something amazing. And it helped me develop a sense of wonder, to be amazed by little things. I’m so happy to spend 45 or 50 minutes underwater, to be amazed by the tiny creatures.”
Now in her 50s, Alexandra says she feels “blessed and lucky” to have survived an experience that shaped her as a person and changed her outlook on the world.
‘When I’m in a queue, waiting for something more than an hour, and I’m super annoyed, I remember this episode and think ‘Alexandra, keep in mind you can wait for more than one hour. You can wait forever.’”
But nowadays, she also goes for years without thinking of the accident.
“It’s something that is in the past, completely in the past. It’s like a story that happened to someone else. I’m telling you as if the story happened with another Alexandra, not me,” she says. “It’s very strange, but that’s the sensation I have today.”
When she does reflect on the incident today, Alexandra finds she can only focus on the positive.
“Twenty years later, I can only tell beautiful things about the story,” she says.
“But it stayed with me for decades, not as trauma, but as a quiet reminder of how thin the line can be between adventure and loss, and how travel, at its most extreme, exposes both our limits and our dependence on others.”
