PANGKALAN BUN, Jan. 7-- Searchers involved in the search for wreckage and bodies of passengers aboard the ill-fated AirAsia QZ8501 have been put to the test as they found no easy way to carry out their tasks amid lingering heavy weather that has impeded searches at the crash site located in the Java Sea near Borneo's Kumai Bay.

Bad weather that possibly contributed to the crash of the flight that occurred on Dec. 28 has continued to loom in the days after the disaster and has hampered the efforts by the search and rescue teams to find victims of the crash.

Despite all of these difficulties, Indonesia, however, has won the respect and praise from the international community for its ability in finding the crash site location, just three days after the crash took place.

Indonesia's government-sanctioned agency tasked to undertake search and rescue efforts, the BASARNAS, has extensive experience in carrying out its job due to its past experiences in handling such catastrophes and calamities across the country, from plane crashes, tsunamis, landslides, earthquake and volcanic eruptions that often occur in the nation that is located within the Ring of Fire.

The expertise of the Indonesian agency has been proved again in the search for crashed AirAsia plane QZ8501. Through an excellent coordination with teams from several countries, the BASARNAS-led operation found debris and bodies of the plane's passengers, three days after the incident took place.

The Britain-based FlighGlobal magazine dubs BASARNAS as one of the most modern search and rescue teams in Asia. It said that it is no easy task to find a plane crash location in a county that has nearly 18,000 islands with particularly complicated geographical conditions.

Despite those praises, people running the operation encountered uphill challenges to carry out their jobs due to bad weather.

One of them was Adil Triyanto, an elderly man who leads one of BASARNAS vessels KN SAR Purworejo. The man who is in his mid fifties has to make correct decision to run his vessel amid nasty weather that continues to loom in areas identified as the crash site of AirAsia QZ8501 in the Java Sea near Karimata Strait.

The BASARNAS search vessel has been on duty since the plane was declared missing on Dec. 28.

"We were initially tasked to comb waters around East Belitung as according to the authority, the lost contact location was around those waters. Now we are shifting to the Java Sea to find the debris or passengers of the plane," Adil, the soft-spoken elderly man told Xinhua onboard the Purworejo vessel on Friday.

He leads 17 crew who run the first class-categorized vessel with a dead weight tonnage (DWT) of more than 300 tons.

Adil said that weather has been unfriendly since the initial debris and bodies were found and that this has made it hard for the vessel to carry out its job.

"High waves have hindered our tasks many times. Besides endangering our ship, the foam from the waves may be leading the searchers to falsely assume they're seeing floating bodies," Adil said after receiving several phone calls from the captain's seat to coordinate with other search vessels.

The experienced sailor who is largely sleep-deprived during his extensive search for the doomed QZ8501, said weather at the crash site often turned bad, making the search ineffective and sometimes forcing ships to turn back to their bases in Kumai seaport, the closest harbor from the site, which actually takes 4 hours to reach.

Adil said that to avoid encountering bad weather, he left the base early in the morning so it would have ample time to search before the torrential rain that often comes down at noon.

After the ship approached the search area on Friday, some of his crews started to get to the deck and put on binoculars while the ship kept running on slowly.

Suddenly, one the crew members shouted after he spotted a suspicious object floating not far from the ship.

After closer inspection, another crew member found out that it was a bag of garbage dumped by fishermen.

A ship crewman Irwan said that they have to carefully check every object they saw in the sea before they decided on its credibility. If not, they will let the object continue to drift in the waves. Some helicopters and planes were seen from afar, combing the sea surface at relatively low altitude.

At noon the weather started to get nasty with strong wind blowing notoriously that made the crews sought shelter inside the cabin.

The ship ran slow as the waves raised up to 4 meters that made the ship bounced up and down, right to left wildly.

Amid that rough situation, the engine suddenly stopped, which incited an eerie situation inside the cabin. After a while, the restart of the engine broke the silence. In the captain's cockpit, Adil continued to make contact with other searching teams in the vicinity.

He was ordered by an Indonesian navy ship to turn back as the waves ahead had raised up to 5 meters, a situation that the Purworejo search ship could not cope with. Adil ordered his officers to turnaround the ship for the safety of his crews.

"Our mission is to look for victims of the crash. But you cannot argue with safety. Don't make more victims from this mission," Adil said.

The ship encircled the crash site to look for debris or bodies of the doomed plane before turned back to the seaport after the bad weather stopped.

Bad weather has been the most crucial problem faced by searchers as it made their expertise useless.

A diver from Indonesian navy's frogman troop unit (Kopaska) said that high waves incited by storm rain would exacerbate poor visibility below the surface of the sea due to murky undersea materials.

In addition, it makes plumes of undersea steam shoot out erratically. "In that kind of condition we cannot see anything even with spotlights. The high waves would also endanger crews of the supporting boat that are awaiting on the the surface," Muhammad Basrori, a 26 years old diver from the Kopaska told Xinhua onboard the Purworejo search ship on Thursday.

A total of 47 divers from the navy's teams of Kopaska, Jala Mangkara (Denjaka)and Amphibian Surveillance (Taifib) failed to embarked to the searching areas due to heavy weather that occurred since the morning. Speaking near diving equipments prepared by the navy, Basrori said that divers also taking risks from predators and poisonous sea snakes that are often seen in shallow waters.

"Before the dive, we were injected with anti-poison serum to avoid bad impacts from sea snake bites," Basrori said.

In case of searching bodies from calamity in the sea, Basrori said that divers must also pay high attention to predators like sharks that seek food from those lifeless bodies.

The man who takes part in the initial diver team deployed in the mission said that stingray is also a serious threat as once a diver is stung by its tail, he will no longer survive within the next few minutes.

Deployment of the initial diving team was eventually delayed a few days later due to the ensuing heavy weather.

Search from the air also demands searchers' high skills and expertise as the searching area spreads in tens of nautical miles in Indonesia's Java Sea near Karimata Strait.

Lieut. Col. Setiawan, a pilot of Indonesian air forces' CN 295 surveillance plane, said that his plane had to fly non-stop at an average of 10 hours each day in the mission to seek debris and bodies from the crashed Air Asia QZ 8501. "The flight was also quite risky as we fly flat above the sea surface at an altitude of 500 feet, or 100 meters for 6 hours," Setiawan told Xinhua on Sunday in Pangkalan Bun air force base that has been used as a command post to evacuate debris and bodies found at the crash site.

Setiawan said that pilots were all required to have fit bodies in order to fly in such a low altitude above sea surface for hours.

"Flying in that situation may cause vertigo to the pilots. They may hardly be able to determine the color of the sky. On the other hand they are assigned to stay focus searching for objects in the sea surface," the pilot from Squadron 2 based in Jakarta air forces base pointed out.

The command post besieged helicopters and planes in the air forces base located the closest to the crash site.

Those aircraft from all forces and police are ready to be scrambled to seek suspected objects on the sea surface. Besides searching the debris and bodies, helicopters are tasked to immediately evacuate the recovered bodies from navy ships that keep them after being raised from the sea by searchers.

Excellent coordination and efforts have been demonstrated by multinational teams carrying out the mission. As of Wednesday, the teams have recovered 40 bodies from the crash.

An official with the Indonesian national search and rescue agency (BASARNAS) SB Supriyadi said that most probably bodies of passengers were still trapped in the wreckage of the plane.