Rescuers were resuming a search today of dozens of uninhabited islands and uncharted reefs for five divers who disappeared two days ago.

Three Britons – Kathleen Mitchinson, Charlotte Allin and her boyfriend, James Manning – were reported missing off the Komodo national park in Indonesia with two other divers at 3pm on Thursday (9am BST). The other missing divers were named as Lauren Pinel, from France, and Elena Neradairen, from Sweden.

The search teams hope that the group has survived the strong currents in waters where sharks and poisonous snakes are common and have reached land safely.

Ms Mitchinson, owner of the Reef-seeker dive school, was leading a “drift dive” on Thursday afternoon. The group is believed to have been caught in an unusually strong underwater current and was swept unseen past their waiting boat.

Miss Allin, 24, from Torrington, North Devon, had been living with Mr Manning in Phuket, Thailand, where they worked at a dive school. Friends said that her parents, David and Sue, were being comforted by their daughter, Katie Marie, and son, Richard.

Yesterday the entire local community joined in the search of the national park, which is home to the Komodo dragon and lies between the islands of Flores and Sumbawa. However, Ernest Lewandowski, Miss Mitchinson’s husband, said that the rescue effort was being hampered by a lack of aircraft fuel. “Time is critical. It’s absolutely blistering hot out there,” he said.

The search was due to resume at first light today but the rescuers admitted that they were struggling to cover the large and sparsely populated area. “Everybody including the tourists, the harbourmaster, and military, police, navy, everyone will come to help,” Mr Lewandowski said.

He said that he and his wife had led two separate groups of tourists into the waters, which are popular with divers for their unspoilt coral reefs teeming with marine life.

Mr Lewandowski noticed that his wife’s group was missing only when his own group surfaced an hour after they entered the water.

Mr Lewandowski said last night: “There were three boats out today searching. I was on a speedboat going around all the beaches and everything to see if they had washed up.”

The search was called off at 3am and resumed at dawn yesterday. “It’s a new moon so it’s very dark out there,” Mr Lewandowski said.

Strong currents run through the waters and locals say that the area has claimed the lives of several divers in the past.Although the missing divers had entered seas of 26C (78.8F) or 27C they could have been swept into waters with temperatures as low as 19C, where they would have been at serious risk of hypothermia.

Despite the mounting odds, there was a chance that the divers had survived. Nine years ago the British divers Mike Haward and Neil Ireland survived in the same seas for 20 hours before reaching land, where they were eventually spotted by a rescue boat.

Last month Dick Neely, 38, from Norfolk, and his American girlfriend, Alison Dalton, 40, drifted nine miles to the Great Barrier Reef.

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