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Four Australian tourists and three Indonesians went missing off the coast of Indonesia’s Aceh Province Sunday Night. As the Sydney Morning Herald reports, the Australians were traveling to a remote island on a surfing trip when their wooden speed boat struck rough weather.
The four Australians include Elliot Foote, Steph Weisse, Will Teagle and Jordan Short. Onboard the missing vessel are also three Indonesian crew: the boat owner and two mechanics.
The Australians had been on Nias with eight other friends as part of a surfing trip for Foote’s 30th birthday, a gift from his father. The original plan had been to travel to Pinang in the Banyak Islands, where they were to rent out bungalows for 10 days. The group took two separate boats from Nias around 3 p.m. on Sunday, but only one of them arrived.
Staff at the Banyak Islands resort began to search for the missing boat on Monday around 2 a.m., but were unsuccessful. The Nias search and rescue office was then called and they joined the search. Monday night, Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade chartered a private plane to contribute to the search party.
“Our team has arrived at Sarang Alu Island today to search the area. It is the last spot before both boats separated,” said Chief Octavianto of Basarnas, the National Search and Rescue Agency in Indonesia. “The waves are three to four meters high. It is raining heavily and it’s dark. We can only use smaller boats with good aerodynamics due to the weather. We are searching within 40 nautical miles of Sarang Alu Island.”
“They have life jackets on board, they had food and water and there is shelter on the boat. It has a roof,” Elliot Foote’s father Peter told the Sydney Morning Herald. “Apparently the waves weren’t that problematic. It was just the visibility in the storm. We’re all hoping they’ve either run out of fuel or they got lost and missed the island or more likely there may be an engine failure on the boat, which unfortunately doesn’t have any GPS.”
“They used simple boats, wooden boats,” said Octavianto. “They really went there on their own.”
