Troubled waters

At 5:30 a.m. Saturday, 14 and a half nightmarish hours into Ally and Rich's ordeal, hints of light finally broke the darkness on the Great Barrier Reef.

Matt Lauer: Dawn means the night is over. Maybe the search can begin again. But you in particular start to think about what you know about sharks?

Rich Neely: Yeah. All of the guests on the boat that I work on, they all want to see sharks. And the best time to see them is sunrise diving, as early as possible. So I know that once it comes up and there's a light above us, we're silhouettes on the surface. There's me. Ally next to me. Black wetsuits. Again, don't think about it. Put it out of your head.

Matt Lauer: And don't talk about it.

Rich Neely:  And don't talk about it.

Matt Lauer: How long did this night seem? How long did it feel?

Ally Dalton: An eternity.

Rich Neely:  It did, yeah.

Across the choppy seas - some 7 or 8 miles away - it had also been a trying night for the 18 distraught passengers still on board the Pacific Star.

Rachel Hauser:  I woke up maybe 15 or 20 times. I could hear the noise from the helicopter and every time we're thinking "Did they find them, did they find them?"

Mikey Paton:  No one really slept that night.

Michael Paton was chronicling the tense evening in his travel journal.

Michael reading: "Ally and Rich were still missing, and the boat had reached a state of panic."

On the boat, it had been 14 and a half hours of fear and confusion.

On Friday afternoon, 4 divers had followed Ally and Rich into the water. Those divers were safely picked up by the dinghy, but had returned with a warning about the surprisingly fierce currents.

Rachel Hauser: Saying that the currents had been quite strong underneath. And they felt they were pulled - quite strongly by it.

That was shortly after 3'oclock. Everyone knew Ally and Rich should already be back - but no-one seemed concerned. 

Mikey Jones: It didn't occur to us that they wouldn't come back.

Matt Lauer: In fact, things were so relaxed, these boys plunged in for a dive.

Mikey Jones: We didn't appreciate how severe it was that they hadn't surfaced in the agreed time. We were just like "Oh, they're 5 minutes late, you know, it's not such a big deal." So, we just jumped in really.

Michael reading diary: "Mikey and Mark entered the water, returning around 45 minutes later. They'd been caught in the current though they were quite lucky and still managed to return to the boat safely."

The boys had barely managed to out-swim the currents. By the time they climbed back on board, Ally and Rich were an hour overdue. It was only then, the passengers say, that the crew realized something was terribly wrong. The dive instructor was frantic.

Rachel Hauser:  We started to really freak out and realize something was really up - and bad, you know, he thought by that time they would be on the boat

Matt Lauer: Everyone rushed to the top deck to help the crew scan the seas.

Michael reading diary: "All of the passengers were on the roof with all available sets of binoculars trying to spot anything floating in the water."

Mikey Jones: "Whoa, is that them? Is that them? And it wasn't them."

The Pacific Star ran up and down the lagoon,  but there was no sign of Ally and Rich. And at sunset, when the waves swelled, the boat was forced to stop moving.

Rachel Hauser:  The storm was pretty bad. The skipper said he didn't want to put our lives at risk, and we're going to moor at the buoy for the night and wait for the rescue.

None of the passengers Dateline spoke to is certain what time the call was placed to alert authorities, but many found the wait for help unnerving.

Xavier Zen-Ruffinen: It was quite late. We're also trying to listen for planes or helicopters. And saying "that's weird," because no rescue is here to try and locate them.

Michael reading diary: "At this point, all of the crew were visibly shaken. Most of the passengers were in the saloon, trying and failing not to think about what was going on."

While the passengers made futile attempts to distract themselves, the panicked dive instructor dove into the black water.

Michael reading diary: "Kylie was going to dive into the lagoon to try and look for them underwater."

Xavier Zen-Ruffinen: He was really stressed, panicking, taking all his stuff. And he went into the small boat, the dinghy.

Rachel Hauser: He started to dive basically in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night.

Michael reading diary: "Kylie returned from the dive with no results.  At this point, the helicopter arrived, and began searching with large spotlights."

Around 2 a.m., the water police boarded to question the passengers and crew. By morning, a somber mood had set in.

Mikey Jones It was really sort of sad and low.

Michael reading diary: "And hope of a happy ending was rapidly fading on the boat."

As the subdued passengers wondered if ally and rich had survived the night, the rescuers trying to find them were feeling just as skeptical.

Patrick Martin: They're out in the deep ocean, miles and miles away from land, and the chances of picking them up in the water were quite remote.

Matt Lauer: Three aircraft, including two choppers equipped with infrared cameras that sense heat, had searched much of the night, covering nearly 63 square nautical miles north of the lagoon -- but found nothing.

At 5 a.m., John Chate and Patrick Martin went up in this chopper, one of 10 aircraft that launched an intensified daylight search.

John Chate: There's not much we can do overnight. If we'd got the call before sundown, we may have been able to get out and find them.

Their job was painstaking. In the midst of the vast ocean, Ally and Rich would be easy to miss.

Patrick Martin: You're looking for a surface area the size of say a basketball which would sort of represent somebody's head. You're only going to catch that in a quick glance. And the greatest fear I have is, what if we've flown over the two divers in the water and we've missed them?

Ally and Rich feared the very same thing. By 8 a.m., Rich was taking photos of one plane after another circling above ... but it had been 18 hours -- and the couple had little faith that anyone would ever find them.

Ally Dalton: We were really at our lowest, lowest point. One helicopter in particular came very close to us. And we thought, "If he can't see us, they're never going to see us."  And we were discussing "How can we make it through another day?" Because we knew we couldn't make it through another night, for certain.

Matt Lauer: And then you see the plane -

Finally, someone knew where they were. But as the plane was approaching, so was a deadly sea creature.

MORE FROM NEWSMAKERS

Newsmakers Section Front

Secrets Of The Lost Symbol Read an excerpt from 'The Lost Symbol' The Michael Jackson Tapes Michael Jackson: ‘I am scared of my father’ Back to Woodstock Kidnapped Heiress: The Patty Hearst Story On tour with Taylor Swift See behind-the-scenes web videos of Taylor Swift Slideshow: Concert photos of Taylor Swift Kids of 'Slumdog': Where are they now? Newsmakers Section Front   Add Newsmakers headlines to your news reader: