A BRITISH couple who went missing while scuba diving described yesterday how they swam and and floated for 12 hours in shark-infested waters only to scramble ashore on a desert island inhabited by 10ft-long komodo dragons.

They had to fight off one of the giant lizards, which have shark-like serrated teeth and have been known to kill humans, by pelting it with rocks.

James Manning, 30, and his girlfriend Charlotte “Charlie” Allin, 25, were among a group of five divers feared dead after they went missing in treacherous waters off the beautiful islands of eastern Indonesia for more than 40 hours.

Allin and three others were finally spotted waving frantically on the beach of Rinca island – 20 miles from where they vanished – by a policeman aboard one of 30 boats that had been called in to search for them.

Manning, a former Royal Marine and veteran of the conflict in Iraq, who had gone to the other side of the island to create an SOS signal with rocks and driftwood, was rescued a few minutes later.

The divers found food on the island by scraping mussels and other shellfish from rocks to eat but had no fresh water to drink.

A shortage of fuel for aircraft meant police had to enlist local fishermen to help cover the search area.

In a phone call from the hospital where all five divers had been taken for medical examination, Allin, a former bank employee from Northam, in Devon, told her parents: “We’re safe but absolutely exhausted and dehydrated.

“We were pulled out to sea by the strong currents and drifted from where we jumped off the boat to go scuba diving.

“We drifted for a long time before finding a log to cling on to. Then one of us saw land and he swam to it to see if it was safe and then we all followed.”

Manning, from Barnstaple, told his family: “I have got cuts and bruises all over my body but otherwise I’m okay.”

Both the couple are experienced divers – friends say Allin has made 800 dives – and had taken a holiday from working for a diving instructor in Thailand to explore Indonesian waters.

They were with another Briton, Kathleen Mitchinson, from North Shields, Tyne and Wear, who runs a dive school; a French diver; and Elena Neralairen, a Swede.

Laurent Pinel, 31, the Frenchman, said: “We struggled against the current for several hours but eventually stopped swimming and tied ourselves together by our diving vests to preserve energy.

“It was late into the night when we saw another island in the distance and decided to make one more effort to reach land before being swept out of the relative protection of the island chain and into the open sea. If we’d continued to drift it would have been the ocean.”

They had reached the palm-tree island of Rinca, inhabited by the world’s largest lizard as well as wild pigs and buffalo but little else.

“We had nothing to eat. We ate some kind of mussel scraped from the rocks. On the beach a komodo dragon came amongst us on Friday afternoon. Between us we had to pelt it with rocks to scare it away,” added Pinel.

The dragons are thought to be the source of Chinese legends about great scaly man-eating monsters on the islands. The lizard’s bite is not venomous but the bacteria in its mouth are so poisonous that wounds do not heal and victims may die later of septicaemia.

Mitchinson and her husband, Ernest Lewandowski, 53, who is originally from Carlisle, run the Reefseekers diving business on the much larger island of Flores.

They had taken two separate groups aboard a wooden boat to explore one of the world’s richest marine environments around the group of islands that together make up the Komodo national park.

Sharks, manta rays and sea turtles patrol coral reefs and tropical waters that boast 260 species of coral and 70 types of sponge.

The divers jumped into the water at about 3pm local time on Thursday. An hour later, a sudden strong current began to sweep in from the north.

The alarm was raised at about 6pm when Lewandowski and his group of five surfaced from an hour’s diving to find the boat empty and no sign of his wife.

Investigators will want to know why the boat was left to float unmanned and why the divers ignored general advice not to dive at this time of the year.

Divers say a combination of relatively shallow water between the many islands in the Komodo group and tide changes can create strong currents of swirling water that can carry divers tens of miles away in a matter of hours. They describe how the the strong and fickle currents cause a line of treacherous whirlpools and waves that appear to stand up and “dance” with the colliding current.

Lewandowski, who has 15 years’ diving experience, has had several run-ins with the Indonesian authorities. He and his wife left Britain in 2000 to start a holiday business in the islands.

In 2006 the ministry of marine and fishery affairs said it had the power to expel him for alleged violation of its investment regulations, which ban foreigners from owning land. The threat was never carried out. Additional reporting: Brendan Montague, and Dewi Loveard in Jakarta

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