The Dead from Cabin 2

By the time the helmsman of Sea Legend attempts to navigate two overcrowded dinghies through the darkness and metre-high waves, his ship has turned into a fireball. Something booms over the whipped-up sea, a short and hard sound, like a grenade explosion, twice.

Over 3,000 kilometres away, Gina De Carlo sleeps under a skylight in a home on the outskirts of Bielefeld, Germany. These are the last hours before the life she knows comes to an end.

It is Thursday, 22 February 2024, shortly before four o’clock in the morning. A luxury yacht, 42 metres long and four decks high, is sinking in the Red Sea. A fire has broken out in the galley. There are 31 women and men on board. Some[AB1]  have heard the frantic cries and manage to escape, just in time, in two rubber dinghies. Thus begins a dramatic escape.

One passenger of Sea Legend is missing, though. Michaela De Carlo, cabin 2, lower deck. A German woman in her late 50s with long dark hair and a contagious love of the sea and diving.

“I often wake up thinking that she’ll come back from this holiday”, her daughter says. Gina De Carlo, a 28-year-old nurse, sits in her living room sunk into a large sofa, a German shepherd resting on her lap. She keeps looking out of the window, as if answers or comfort could be found in the tops of the birch trees.

More than six months after Sea Legend disappeared, it is still unclear exactly where the ship sank. The transmitter that was supposed to report its position had apparently been turned off. The investigating prosecutor in Egypt says the burnt-out wreck lies in a sea area near Safaga, at a depth of about 120 metres. The authorities still officially list Michaela De Carlo as missing.

“She’s dead”, says Gina De Carlo. She has no illusions. But her mind is quicker [at acceptance] than her emotions. Her mother was also her best friend. Gina De Carlo says she wants to finally be allowed to mourn. Instead, she is staring into an abyss of the global leisure industry.

The last voyage of Sea Legend and the circumstances surrounding the accident can be reconstructed with the help of witnesses and documents. Reporters from stern[AB2]  magazine interviewed survivors, relatives, and friends. They evaluated photos, videos, chats, and ship data and spoke to experts, including some in Egypt.

The ship was built in 2019 and operated by a company in the Egyptian coastal city of Hurghada. This company is one of countless providers of expeditions to mysterious places in the underwater world. Their safari boats cruise the open sea for one or two weeks, taking divers to marine areas considered rare species habitats that are virtually inaccessible from land. It’s a world of sharks, large rays, rare creatures, and giant corals in all colours and shapes. The divers float around in it like astronauts.

The owners cater to the needs of an experience-oriented society that has elevated the extraordinary to the norm. Their yachts can accommodate two or three dozen divers, often charging several thousand euros per passenger per week. They recruit their crews from an almost inexhaustible pool of workers, often at low wages. This lucrative business attracts companies that care for profit. For the safety of the boats and passengers, sometimes not so much.

In September 2019, news spread around the world that shed light on this industry. Off the coast of California, a dive boat called Conception burned down, killing 34 people on board. It seemed like a single unfortunate accident. However, in recent years, dozens of ships like Conception and Sea Legend have sunk, burned down or exploded. Many of them were in Southeast Asia, where the underwater world is particularly rich in species and colourful, and around half off the coast of Egypt. The Red Sea, a popular destination for Germans, has been the scene of an unprecedented series of accidents.

On 24 April 2023, Carlton Queen sank. Nine crew members and 26 divers were rescued because other ships happened to be nearby.

In early June 2023, New Dream sank on its way back to the holiday resort of Marsa Alam. The 36 women and men on board were rescued.

A few days later, Hurricane burned down near the Elphinstone dive site. Three British divers died.

In February 2024, Sea Legend was reduced to ashes.

At the end of June, Exocet, a luxury ship with four decks and a jacuzzi, was swallowed by raging waves. The passengers survived.

In October, Seaduction sank in a storm, leaving 18 divers to drift through the night in lifeboats for hours before fishermen discovered them.

These are just a few of the known cases; others remain hidden. Such accidents often only appear in the databases of the relevant state authorities after years, if at all. Moreover, many authorities don’t publish their statistics.

Gina De Carlo has a solicitor now. She had to learn that the truth can sink with a ship at sea. Only rarely does an accident lead to a serious investigation.

Chapter 1: The Magic and the Omens

It’s a Saturday afternoon in February 2024. The Old Sheraton Marina lies beneath a picture-postcard blue sky, with yachts and sailing boats bobbing on gentle waves at the jetty. The marina is located just outside the centre of Hurghada, an Egyptian coastal town with miles of white sandy beaches. It’s named after a striking weathered tower that stands by the water. In the 1960s, Old Sheraton Hotel ushered in a new era in Hurghada: the era of mass tourism.

Every year now, the small town attracts over three million people who want to enjoy affordable holidays in the summer or escape the cold in the winter. It is also a dream destination for divers from all over the world; those from Germany only need to fly a few hours to get here. The coral reefs of the Red Sea – colourful underwater cities that have not been as damaged by climate change as those in the Caribbean and off Australia – begin just off the coast.

This Saturday, a white minibus rolls through the guarded entrance to the marina, and five people get out at the pier, having been picked up by the driver from their hotels. They include an urban planner from Singapore, a consultant and a refugee aid worker from Switzerland, an engineer from southern Germany and Michaela De Carlo, administrator of a student residence in Bielefeld. They are part of a group of 17 divers from Germany, Italy, Argentina, and the USA. An adventure awaits them, and also a social experiment.

For a week, they’ll live with strangers on a yacht, surrounded by nothing but water as far as the eye can see. What connects them is the feeling of belonging to a circle of initiates. They have experienced the charms of a sphere unfathomable to landlubbers. Some have logged more than 1,000 dives in their logbooks.

All of them had found Sea Legend on the internet: 16 double cabins, air conditioning, two 1,000 hp diesel engines, total value around two million euros.

Michaela De Carlo is one of the first to board the ship. One of her fellow travellers is running barefoot across the yacht’s terraced decks, filming everything with his camera. Others take photos of their cabins and the sun decks, complete with beige sofas and loungers.

Michaela De Carlo takes her luggage to cabin 2, one of eight accommodations in the belly of Sea Legend, right at the bottom. They are located close to the engine room, it’s noisy and the air smells of diesel, which also means that the cabin costs significantly less than those on the upper decks. De Carlo paid around 950 euros for the whole week, including meals and unlimited dives. Even for Egypt, that is impressively cheap.

Some passengers share their cabin with a partner, a parent or a friend. Michaela De Carlo shares hers with a stranger. She knows no fear, says her daughter. She had found and lost love, experienced the ups and downs of life, happiness and misfortune. Shortly before, the father of her two children, who had long since become a good friend, had collapsed at a concert and never got up again.

The other woman in her cabin is Yiwen Ng, an urban planner from Singapore. Michaela De Carlo would later describe her as a pleasant person, friendly, a little introverted.

On the trip, De Carlo spends a lot of time reading, thick novels piled up on her bedside table. Sometimes she talks to others about her many diving trips. She swipes through photos on her phone: corals, gliding manta rays, dense schools of fish. She knows all the species, often including their Latin names. She’s been diving for 15 years, and the very first time she went, she saw a whale shark, as long as a bus, almost close enough to touch. An experience others court for decades.

“It was a kind of magic”, says her daughter. No place made her as happy as the sea.

Michaela De Carlo and the others dive in two groups, each led by a member of the crew. The sunshine is astonishingly piercing for this time of year, and even 20 metres below the surface, the water is often as clear as glass.

The first day flies by, then the second, the third. They see dense shoals of barracudas, torpedo rays, and corals standing in the current like giant fans. They dive in a coral garden with manatees and turtles whose heads and bodies are almost as big as theirs. They travel to reefs that are among the most popular in the world: Brothers, Daedalus, Elphinstone. Nature shows them beauty, but their main goal eludes them. The group hardly sees any sharks, and when, they are only fleeting shadows that appear briefly in the blue and vanish.

Michaela De Carlo teams up with one of the experienced divers, Holger Raetsch, a firefighter from Berlin. The two descend to 40 metres, where deep-sea sharks hunt. This is the limit for recreational divers because at such depths[AB3] , the compressed air in their tanks turns into a life-threatening gas mixture.

At night, the captain steers Sea Legend through rough seas for hours to take them to the next area. The ship rocks; in the cabins, minibars slide across the floor; shower cubicles shatter; chairs and tables fly around in the restaurant, smashing glass panes. The furniture is not bolted down like on other ships. One of the passengers who sometimes gets up at night to smoke notices that he never sees a fire watch[AB4] . But they are so enthralled by the underwater experiences that they forget warning signs like this.

On Wednesday, the fifth day of the trip, De Carlo decides to take a break. She has a cold, her sinuses are inflamed, and she feels nauseous. She stays in cabin 2 on the lower deck and takes some pills, which make her tired. She probably doesn’t notice how, before dinner, someone on the sun deck connects their smartphone to a loudspeaker, inspiring a small group to dance in the setting sun to Village People, Abba, and the Bee Gees. She doesn’t hear the bell that the crew rings to signal dinner, either.

Yiwen Ng, her cabin mate, sprints to the lower deck to get her. “Michaela? Dinner!”

After eating, De Carlo retreats to her cabin again. Ng decides to sleep on one of the sofas on deck 3: she’s bothered by the smell of diesel from the engine room. Around half past ten, she fetches her blanket from the lower deck. She wishes De Carlo good night and closes the cabin door behind her.

Today, she says this moment haunts her. She was probably the last person to see Michaela De Carlo.

Chapter 2: A Ship in Flames

It’s around half past three in the morning on the fateful Thursday in February 2024 when Malik Schukri*[AB5]  wakes up on deck 3. He gets up and leans sleepily against the railing, looking out over the wild and impenetrably black sea. Schukri, 28 years old, comes from an Arab coastal town, lives in Germany, and works as a programmer for a global corporation. He likes it there, but he misses the sea. It calms him, even when it’s in turmoil. Like Michaela De Carlo and Yiwen Ng, he’d booked a cabin on the lower deck. He, too, has fled the smell of diesel and has been sleeping on one of the sun decks for days.

Now the captain is heading straight for the towering waves at high speed. The ship rises, crashes down, and its massive steel hull vibrates for seconds.

At about the same time, one deck below, Gennaro Palomba awakes. A pungent smell wafts into his cabin. Palomba, a tax advisor from Apulia, shakes his wife awake, crawls out of his bunk, opens the cabin door, and sees thick smoke pour out through the cracks in the closed caboose door. Palomba wakes up a member of the crew who’s sleeping in a chair at the rear of deck 2. A second crew member rushes over, grabs a fire extinguisher, and pushes open the door. The oxygen that flows into the caboose accelerates the fire.

On deck 3, Malik Schukri sees flames shooting through the floor, the fire eating its way up from the caboose through the wooden ceiling.

The smoke detectors installed in every room of Sea Legend remain silent. Trying to collect his thoughts, Schukri rushes to the cabin corridor on his deck and pushes open the doors, one after the other. “Get out, get out!”, he shouts.

In room 15, a doctor and her father, Jana and Heinrich Maidhof from Berlin, are startled awake.

In number 13, the engineer from southern Germany grabs his phone and runs outside.

Schukri, still in the corridor, pulls a fire extinguisher off the wall. A crew member holds him back, saying the ship cannot be saved.

One floor below, on a platform at the stern, crew members lower two inflatable boats with outboard motors into the water. Others call out to God. Passengers in pyjamas run about and shout in confusion, a jumble of voices and bodies. This platform is their chance to survive. The sea is raging, the water’s bitterly cold, not even a hint of the coast in sight. At best, there are only minutes left before the fire reaches them. In the thick smoke, it’s impossible to tell who is still missing.

For a moment, Schukri considers whether he is about to make a mistake that will cost him his life. Then he rushes down a small staircase to the lower deck, throws open doors, shouts, looks into dark cabins, doesn’t see if anyone answers, doesn’t wait for a response.

Nothing moves in cabin 2.

In cabin 3, Holger Raetsch jumps out of bed, gets on a shirt and jogging trousers. As a firefighter, he is used to being woken up and having to function immediately. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the American [AB6] and a crew member running past his cabin, followed by Malik Schukri.

By the time Raetsch reaches the stairs, smoke is beginning to fill the lower deck. He makes it upstairs just before the fire captures the stairs. His experience tells him that no one after him had a chance of escaping from the lower deck. In a fire like this, a person has about four breaths before carbon monoxide causes them to lose consciousness.

Sea Legend is now drifting in the sea, uncontrolled; the captain has left the bridge. The two tethered dinghies are being tossed about by the waves; the first passengers jump in, some landing on their stomachs. Jana Maidhof, the Berlin doctor, asks one of the crew for life jackets. He points to the flames.

The wind drives a wall of black smoke towards them. She looks at her father and says, “We're not going to survive this.”

This is how Sea Legend begins to sink, as documented and recounted by the victims. Some moments are only witnessed by one person; in some memories, unimportant details contradict each other. In the end, however, almost everything fits together to form a coherent picture.

Egypt has strict safety regulations and laws, which require diving vessels such as Sea Legend to have a sufficient number of life jackets, fire extinguishers, and smoke detectors. And a crew that regularly practises for emergencies. The numerous accidents suggest that many operators and their crews fail to comply with these regulations. The survivors of Sea Legend also say that the crew had no recognisable emergency protocol and no evacuation plan. The fire was only part of the drama. Afterwards, too, they were hovering between life and death more than one time.

Chapter 3: The Escape and the Premonition of Death

The moon casts a faint light on the two overloaded rubber dinghies, a small red one and a larger white one, drifting through metre-high waves in the middle of nowhere. About 30 figures huddle in the dark, close together, on the air chambers and on the floor, their eyes fixed on a fireball where their ship had just been drifting. They’ve covered about 500 metres when two detonations thunder through the night. The heat of the fire probably put so much pressure on the divers’ compressed air cylinders that they burst. A few people film the burning ship and the explosions with their phones.

According to the videos’ metadata, this happens shortly before four in the morning. Less than half an hour earlier, Malik Schukri was still standing at the Sea Legend’s railing. Now, the yacht is shooting jets of flame into the sky, which from a distance look like huge flares. And while some passengers still think they’d just escaped with their lives, others[AB7]  fear that death has only granted them a brief reprieve.

The large rubber dinghy has to tow the small one on a long rope. Its engine had failed shortly after take-off. In addition, the air chambers of both boats aren’t properly inflated. The weight of the many bodies pushes them so deep that they fill up with water. The victims of the shipwreck scoop it back into the sea with their bare hands, rucksacks, and bottles. But it’s never enough.

The women and men on board fear they will drown unless fate sends them help. The two boats drift through the sea, about 20 metres apart. The howling wind and the thunderous waves drown out any attempt to shout from boat to boat. The captain and his crew seem overwhelmed by the situation. Nobody gives orders. Nobody seems to be checking whether everyone on the ship’s passenger list has made it onto the dinghies. A serious omission, as will soon become apparent. And not the only one.

According to calculations by stern magazine, the two dinghies are initially let down about 15 kilometres from the coast. They occasionally head in the wrong direction, without flares and life jackets, which are actually mandatory. The ship’s crew refuses to notify the coast guard: apparently, they fear trouble. At least, that is what several survivors, including Malik Schukri, report later. He is the one who speaks the crew’s language and understands their conversations.

When one of the phones picks up a weak signal, Schukri dials the emergency number and gets through to a man from the military police – who says, repeatedly, that he cannot help. He only seems to prick up his ears when Schukri mentions that tourists from Germany, the USA, and other countries were going to die. “How many foreigners?” he asks.

After two hours, at dawn, the white boat threatens to capsize. The water is knee-deep inside, getting deeper by the minute. Someone from the crew cuts the tow line. The helmsman drives the boat at full throttle toward the coastline, which is now visible. He leaves the red dinghy to the sea – 13 soaked men and women hoping that a miracle will save them.

It’s half past six when the white dinghy reaches the coast about 120 kilometres south of Hurghada, where the journey began.

It’s quarter past eleven when a coast guard military vessel enters the port of Safaga. A red carpet is rolled out on the pier for the survivors, whom the coast guards have rescued from the second dinghy in a dangerous operation. Egyptian media are already reporting that the navy has saved all international tourists.

Overcome by a dark premonition, Yiwen Ng types a message into her smartphone. Where is the woman with whom she’d shared a cabin? No one can remember seeing her in the past few hours.

The next moment, the message flashes on the phone of Jana Maidhof, the doctor from Berlin. She was on the other dinghy and is now staying at a hotel with her group.

Is Michaela with you?

She wasn’t on our boat.

Oh my God

Chapter 4: The Big Cover-Up

It’s already dark in the south of Bielefeld when a woman and a man in uniform enter an ochre-yellow residential building. Gina De Carlo is sitting at the dining table in the living room with an acquaintance. Moments later, her life is turned upside down. The two police officers say that a ship has sunk in the Red Sea: the passengers have been rescued but her mother is missing.

Gina De Carlo says she can still see it all before her. The flashing warning lights in front of the house. The regret in the faces of the officers who knew little more than what could be summed up in a few words: ship sunk, mother missing.

Based on everything De Carlo now knows about the accident, she believes that her mother never left her cabin. This is what the footage of the burning Sea Legend and the passengers’ reports suggest. But no one knows for sure whether she perished with the ship or in the sea, unnoticed by the others.

As it becomes increasingly clear to the divers in Safaga that they’d only very narrowly escaped disaster at sea, the cover-up begins on land.

No sooner has the military ship docked than prosecutors question the captain of Sea Legend and his crew. However, the 52 pages of interrogation transcripts available to stern magazine give the impression that the prosecutor and the police merely simulated the questioning.

The crew’s statements consist of text modules, all twelve are identical, word for word. They tell a version of events in which the crew of Sea Legend behaved in an almost exemplary manner. According to it, it was the ship’s engineer who first noticed the fire. The electric fire alarms sounded. The crew formed two groups. One tried to extinguish the fire, the other got the passengers out of their cabins and took them to the lifeboats. All the passengers wore life jackets as they fled.

But this version is full of inconsistencies, and some of it is demonstrably false. For instance, the engineer who claims to have discovered the fire stated that he was on the lower deck. But according to the survivors’ accounts, the smoke was hardly noticeable there until the very end. They all agree that no smoke alarm was heard anywhere. No one on the lifeboats was wearing a life jacket, as several videos prove. And the claim of an orderly rescue operation contradicts almost everything the passengers say. Also, if the crew went about rescuing passengers from the lower deck, why did they miss Michaela De Carlo?

The investigators could have found out all these discrepancies. But if their reports are to be believed, they hardly asked the crew any questions. Apparently, they were not too keen to gather any information from the survivors, either.

After the crew’s been questioned, a group of men in suits enter one of Safaga’s large holiday resorts. In a bar, they open their laptops and have the 16 passengers brought to them.

They have an interpreter with them, as some of the passengers don’t speak English. In retrospect, it’s impossible to know whether he interpreted accurately when the survivors listed the safety deficiencies on board, the violations of what Egyptian authorities require of ship operators. As it turns out, the interpreter was an employee of the company that owned Sea Legend.

Several divers also say that the investigators ordered them to sign a document in Arabic, allegedly a transcript of their interrogations. They were told that they wouldn’t be allowed to leave the room or the country otherwise. Some had the text translated back home. They say that almost everything they told about the safety deficiencies on board was missing.

Similar experiences are reported when talking to survivors of other shipwrecks that have occurred in the Red Sea in recent years. According to diving industry experts, the reasons are obvious. International holidaymakers are one of Egypt’s most crucial sources of income; up to 15 per cent of its economic output depends on hotels, cultural sites, and the Red Sea. No group matters more to them than German tourists. A German woman dying on a burning ship is bad for business.

A scientific study by the Institute for Shipbuilding in Kiel examined [AB8] the accidents and concluded that most of them happened for [AB9] three reasons. Because corners are being cut at the building stage, and shoddy workmanships makes ships capsize easily. Because captains do not know their territory well enough and run aground on reefs or rocks. But above all because fire alarms and smoke detectors do not work, and any short circuit can become life-threatening.

Chapter 5: “Allah Gives, Allah Takes Away”

Gina De Carlo leans against an old building in a pedestrian zone in Bielefeld, smoking a cigarette, her hand trembling. She has an appointment with her solicitor. She’d wanted to do this for months, but the closer the appointment got, the more nervous she became. She wants clarity, she wants to grieve, but she is also scared to.

She’d wanted to move in together – to find a house for herself, her boyfriend, her mother, and their dogs. Now she is looking for documents to settle her mother’s earthly affairs. She has to terminate a lease and contracts, to manage accounts and expenses. But in Germany, this is only possible once her mother is officially dead.

Gina De Carlo needs confirmation from Egypt enabling a German district court to declare her mother dead. She’s tried everything to get this confirmation from the Egyptian authorities; the German embassy in Cairo promised quick help. “After the accident, nothing happened for months”, she says.

Now, her solicitor is supposed to prepare the application. On his wooden desk lies a law book and dozens of blue case files, stacked into small towers. He has placed a sticky marker between two pages: the German Missing Persons Act. The law is one of the reasons why Gina De Carlo says she feels abandoned. Facing bureaucratic problems that she cannot solve herself. Facing her feelings, too.

Several Sea Legend passengers say it’s nothing short of a miracle that there were no more deaths. Malik Schukri, they believe, had saved their lives. It also emerged that after the fire broke out on the ship, eleven hours passed before the Egyptian diving association sent out an emergency call to ships in the area. They were asked to look out for a woman who might be floating in the sea.

However, the public prosecutor’s office in Egypt does not give the impression of intending to find the wreck and clarify the circumstances of the accident.

The German Federal Bureau of Maritime Accident Investigation writes that it cannot investigate because safari ships are not registered with the International Maritime Organisation.

On the phone, the operator of Sea Legend says that he’d lost an expensive ship that wasn’t insured. But that’s life, he muses, Allah gives, Allah takes away. “The accident didn’t damage our business”, he concludes, then quickly ends the conversation.

Several tour operators and booking portals continue to offer his safari yachts. They also market other providers whose ships have burned down or sunk for unexplained reasons. The bleakest thing, the industry insiders say, is that everyone carries on as if nothing happened. The ship owners, the travel industry, the authorities. The sea is a silent witness; what’s more, it removes all traces.

“I’m so angry”, says Gina De Carlo as she leaves her solicitor’s office. Her mother’s tour operator never got in touch, no explanation, no word of regret. Indeed, they continue to send her mother emails – “plan your next diving adventure!”

A few weeks later, a letter arrives from Egypt, and in mid-October, the solicitor sends his application to the magistrates’ court. Gina De Carlo is now awaiting the court’s decision.

She wants to believe that the toxic smoke on Sea Legend killed her mother in her sleep, quickly and reliably[AB10] . If so, at least she would have died without fear, without a struggle.