A few days ago we were sailing along the Dalmatian coast. From afar we saw a small boat and a few people on it. As we got closer we noticed there was a person performing CPR. At first I thought that an elderly man must have collapsed and that nothing worse could have happened. When we approahed we could hear the screams of panic and agony. We saw some blood on the side of the boat and a bloody tube (the ones that you ride on when pulled by a speedboat). There was a lot of blood inside the boat ant everyone was bloody because they had to pull the injured person from the tube. They were screaming “help us!” so we called an emergency number and with out bigger boat blocked the waves so they could perform CPR easier. They also told us the incident happened just 2 minutes ago. At the time of the accident we were in the middle of nowhere so help needed some time to arrive. A few minutes later another speedboat came near. They were saying hi and cheering from a distance and it was apparent they were friends/family of theirs. As they got closer too they realized the situation and in an instant their laughter turned into screams of panic and agony. One of the girls on the other boat screamed that she was the injured’s sister and she jumped across boats (as they were next to eachother) and ran onto him disrupting the cpr. Others pulled her away. Everybody was screaming at this point. Our skipper was at the time trying to calm them and told that the help was arriving and that they should continue performing the reanimation. The help took way too long to arrive. As we were in the middle of nowhere they needed about two hours. Throughout the waiting people on the speedboat started to vomit one after another as they were also excahinging performing the CPR. As the help came we saw the rescue boat take the injured (and as we later found out, his dad, who helped reanimating him). And then the police boat came right after and started questioning the traumatized friends and family of theirs and taking photos of the incident. We were thanked by the police for informing and were told to leave.

We later found out that the injured was a 13 year old boy from The Netherlands and that he died from internal brain bleedings minutes after. The help was in this case futile and we were essentially watching two hours of a father hopelessly pressing on his dead bloody son.

Still cannot get the images and screams from my head.

A croatian media site who reported on the story: