The Naval Service appealed to small fishing boat owners today to join the search for the second of two men who drowned after saving a couple off the coast of West Cork at the weekend.
The body of Peter O'Keeffe (36) was recovered by a local trawler yesterday but the search resumed this morning for the body of student Jonathan Herlihy (23).
The two Cork men were washed away as they valiantly threw a lifebelt to a couple in trouble off Owenahincha Beach, near Clonakilty in west Cork, on Sunday.
The couple made it to safety. Lieutenant Commander Brian Fitgerald, captain of the LE Aoife, appealed for small fishing boats to join the search.
"Clearly two bodies that are in the water that had no inherent buoyancy in themselves and that are feared drowned, the likelihood is that they are lying on the seabed if currents have not taken them away," he said.
"We focused our attention on that area and we were successful yesterday in that a trawler picked up one of the bodies in its net.
"This clearly makes us focus in the same area and require the same type of facilities so we would appeal to any fishing vessel, particularly of a small size that has trawler capability, that it would come join our search and radio us here in the LE Aoife on scene at Owenahincha Beach in west Cork and join in the search that has been tremendous from the response we have received from the west Cork community."
Lt Cdr Fitzgerald said the search was extremely difficult and stressed that hopes should not be raised that because one body was found, the second would also be located.
"This is a very difficult task - it is the proverbial needle in the haystack - and I think all that we achieved yesterday was, in fact, to identify the location of the haystack," he said.
"It would be wrong to initiate false hope and say that because we found one body in a certain location, that the other one is in a similar location. However, we certainly will focus our efforts there.
"But we are still continuing to do the wider search, which stretches a large extent of the west Cork coast."
PA