British diver John Volanthen, who was one of the foreign expert divers drafted in for the rescue of 12 boys and their football coach trapped in a flooded cave in Mae Sai district of Chiang Rai for nine days, said the team of divers located the boys due to the smell in the flooded cave.
Mr Volanthen told BBC Points West about the moment he and his fellow divers first discovered the children alive.
He said it's been mentioned by some members of the press that it was luck.
"I would say that it's absolutely not the case,'' he said. "Wherever there is air space, we surface and we shout and also we smell.
"And in this case, we smelt the children before we actually saw them or heard them,'' he said.
"The visibility in the water is very low, varying down to a few inches. There was also a lot of debris in the cave from previous attempts," he said.
"The cold was also an issue. Some of the children were quite small, so we were quite concerned about how they would hold up on the journey out."
