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| Picture source: news.sky.com |
Sky News is on board their small speedboat to witness some extraordinary work.
The 10 volunteers are local and unpaid. They do not seek credit or publicity, but the job they do daily is remarkable and dangerous. Emotionally, it is extremely challenging for them.
We head northeast, away from the Greek coastline and towards Turkish waters. The mission is the same as all those before: to respond to reports of a boatload of people in trouble.
More than 500,000 migrants - most of them refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan - have set sail towards Greece this year alone.
On the horizon, diver Alexandros Malagaris spots a boat in the water. We move towards it at speed. It is an inflatable dinghy and it is empty.
It is a relief to spot a Greek coastguard vessel in the cove around the corner. Almost all those who were on the small inflatable have already been rescued and transferred to a larger boat.
Alexandros and the coastguard officers communicate briefly between boats. The divers are told that more people need to be rescued from an outcrop of rocks.
We move around the cove, spot the small group still stranded, and help them to safety. Everyone is rescued and there are no injuries. This is a good day, Alexandros says.
We move further up the coast, past beaches littered with hundreds of discarded life jackets.
The dive team want to show us the spot which represents their darkest day.
On the way, we pass the empty inflatable we'd seen earlier and stop for a closer look.
It is a perfect and graphic illustration of the sort of extreme choices refugee families are being driven to take.
The dinghy looks almost homemade and has just one air tube. If that punctures, the whole boat collapses. And a puncture is likely given that the timber flooring is secured together using regular screws with sharp tips.
It has a totally inadequate 10 horsepower outboard and just one fuel tank. Alexandros tells us it holds enough fuel to get to Greek waters, but not to Greek soil.
The refugees pay traffickers upwards of £1,000 each for a space on these dinghies to take them the few miles between Turkey and Greece.
The traffickers provide the boats but do not usually make the journey with the refugees. Instead, a "volunteer" refugee, often with no experience of the seas, is offered a discount if he or she pilots the boat.
Around the next cove, our boat slows. In the water beneath, just a few metres down, is the wreck of the Kusadasi Ilgun.
The small pleasure cruiser was designed to carry seven people - but 10 days ago, in Turkey, it was loaded with 35 refugees.
It hit rocks where it now lies, just 25 metres from the shoreline and safety. Eleven people died; five women and six children, four of them babies and all trapped inside.
Their bodies were recovered by Alexandros and his team. "This was a dark day," he says.
"We have our dark moments. We have soul-searching moments as well."
He shows us footage from the rescue. It is grim. On the bow of the rescue boat lie four children. At a glance, they look as though they are sleeping.
In another underwater image, a child's coat is suspended, snagged on the boat. The empty arm is stretching towards the surface.
"You can see that arm is trying to go to the surface. And that's how the kids died. They left their last breath on the wreck. All the dead, they were babies, kids and their mothers," Alexandros says.
For every difficult day, though, and there have been many, there are others which keep the volunteers going.
Last Sunday, they received a call to head to another cove in the northeast of the island. They were faced with mayhem; 50 people on the rock face. But this was a rescue mission, not a recovery. Half of the refugees were children.
"It was like a creche - like dislodging a whole creche from the rocks," Alexandros says.
"Scared, confused, shaking. Some of them find it a big adventure. Others are petrified."
The divers rely on donations for everything. This week, they were given a new stretcher which will be vital for the next rescue. But it is clear that the volunteers here need emotional support, too.
"All our divers, we are fathers and as a natural instinct, what happens is on a rescue mission you usually mirror your kids' faces on the kids that you are trying to save at that moment, so you don't see somebody else - a foreign kid, a stranger's kid - you actually see your son or your daughter. That's how the mind works." Alexandros says.
By Mark Strong for Sky News
Source: news.sky.com
More than 500,000 migrants - most of them refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan - have set sail towards Greece this year alone.
On the horizon, diver Alexandros Malagaris spots a boat in the water. We move towards it at speed. It is an inflatable dinghy and it is empty.
It is a relief to spot a Greek coastguard vessel in the cove around the corner. Almost all those who were on the small inflatable have already been rescued and transferred to a larger boat.
Alexandros and the coastguard officers communicate briefly between boats. The divers are told that more people need to be rescued from an outcrop of rocks.
We move around the cove, spot the small group still stranded, and help them to safety. Everyone is rescued and there are no injuries. This is a good day, Alexandros says.
We move further up the coast, past beaches littered with hundreds of discarded life jackets.
The dive team want to show us the spot which represents their darkest day.
On the way, we pass the empty inflatable we'd seen earlier and stop for a closer look.
 |
| Abandoned dinghy which carried migrants from Turkey to Greece |
It is a perfect and graphic illustration of the sort of extreme choices refugee families are being driven to take.
The dinghy looks almost homemade and has just one air tube. If that punctures, the whole boat collapses. And a puncture is likely given that the timber flooring is secured together using regular screws with sharp tips.
It has a totally inadequate 10 horsepower outboard and just one fuel tank. Alexandros tells us it holds enough fuel to get to Greek waters, but not to Greek soil.
The refugees pay traffickers upwards of £1,000 each for a space on these dinghies to take them the few miles between Turkey and Greece.
The traffickers provide the boats but do not usually make the journey with the refugees. Instead, a "volunteer" refugee, often with no experience of the seas, is offered a discount if he or she pilots the boat.
Around the next cove, our boat slows. In the water beneath, just a few metres down, is the wreck of the Kusadasi Ilgun.
The small pleasure cruiser was designed to carry seven people - but 10 days ago, in Turkey, it was loaded with 35 refugees.
It hit rocks where it now lies, just 25 metres from the shoreline and safety. Eleven people died; five women and six children, four of them babies and all trapped inside.
Their bodies were recovered by Alexandros and his team. "This was a dark day," he says.
"We have our dark moments. We have soul-searching moments as well."
He shows us footage from the rescue. It is grim. On the bow of the rescue boat lie four children. At a glance, they look as though they are sleeping.
In another underwater image, a child's coat is suspended, snagged on the boat. The empty arm is stretching towards the surface.
"You can see that arm is trying to go to the surface. And that's how the kids died. They left their last breath on the wreck. All the dead, they were babies, kids and their mothers," Alexandros says.
For every difficult day, though, and there have been many, there are others which keep the volunteers going.
Last Sunday, they received a call to head to another cove in the northeast of the island. They were faced with mayhem; 50 people on the rock face. But this was a rescue mission, not a recovery. Half of the refugees were children.
"It was like a creche - like dislodging a whole creche from the rocks," Alexandros says.
"Scared, confused, shaking. Some of them find it a big adventure. Others are petrified."
The divers rely on donations for everything. This week, they were given a new stretcher which will be vital for the next rescue. But it is clear that the volunteers here need emotional support, too.
"All our divers, we are fathers and as a natural instinct, what happens is on a rescue mission you usually mirror your kids' faces on the kids that you are trying to save at that moment, so you don't see somebody else - a foreign kid, a stranger's kid - you actually see your son or your daughter. That's how the mind works." Alexandros says.
By Mark Strong for Sky News
Source: news.sky.com
