The search for a man missing after a boat got into difficulty on Lough Ree yesterday has been wound down for the evening.
Hopes for the safe return of missing fisherman Daryl Burke (30) are fading, with some of those taking part in the rescue effort acknowledging it may now be a recovery operation.
Mr Burke and two other men, David Warnock (27) and John Trimble (60), set off in a small Dory boat from Hodson Bay at around 3pm yesterday.
Mr Warnock died in hospital today, after being rescued from the lough yesterday evening, and Mr Trimble is in a stable condition.
Local man David McEnroe was the last person to speak to the men before they left the pier. He said he attempted to dissuade them from going out.
Mr McEnroe said “one man has lost his life and there is still another man missing. It is still very raw with everybody at the moment.”
“I was the last person to speak to them. They said we are here, there’s three of our friends are up on one of the islands, we are going to get the rest of the stuff up to them, we are going to camp there as well,” he recalled.
“I had asked them to hold on until the weather died off a little bit. They got the blue sky and they got a break in weather and they went for it but the nature of the lake and the nature of the weather here is just treacherous,” he explained.
He decided to call the RNLI when the boat was only about 300 meters out. “I knew with the swell of water that was starting come up again with the weather and the load that was in the boat and the water that was so close to the top of the boat, I knew it wasn’t going to work for them.”
Mr Burke’s wife and members of the Portadown Pikers angling club came to Hodson Bay today.
Lifeboat Operations Manager with Lough Ree Lifeboat Station Damien Delaney said “the search went on yesterday from about 3pm or 3.30pm until dark last night when we had to stand down because of visibility.” “We resumed this morning at about 8am.”
Search teams scoured an area of around five square miles with boats, jetskis, sub aqua units and the coastguard helicopter. Searchers also walked the shoreline while sub aqua units focused their efforts on a half square mile of the lake.
“We will continue until such a time as the man is found, hopefully today if we can at all. We will have a debrief of all of the groups here this evening sometime between six and seven o’clock and we will decide our strategy from there based on the feedback from yesterday and today on where we go next,” Mr Delaney explained.