‘Ger’s children accept he is not coming back alive’

“HIS children have now accepted that he is not coming back alive.”

Those were the tragic words yesterday of Sean Bohan, whose son Ger was the skipper of the stricken Honeydew II.

Sean lives in the house adjacent to where his 39-year-old son and his wife Mary have raised their four children Anthony, 18, Sally Jean, 11, James, nine, and Joseph, six, in Kinsale.

Yesterday, as Mary headed for Dunmore East to be closer to the search, Sean had his own message for the many men and women looking for some sign of his son.

“I would like to thank the local people for their magnificent support, for the outstanding contribution. I cannot believe the support and effort they have made. I hope they will be rewarded for their huge effort,” he said.

Yesterday morning, according to Kinsale Harbourmaster Phil Devitt, another two bus-loads as well as a large number of cars left the Co Cork fishing town carrying volunteers east to offer their help in the search.

“There are 60-70 Kinsale people down there,” he said. “The RNLI are giving relief to the Dunmore East Lifeboat and the Ballycotton Lifeboat. Loads of other people are already down there on the shore search. The Mallow search and rescue people are also down there.”

Unlike the Pere Charles, the whereabouts of the remains of the Honeydew II are still unknown and so the Kinsale people must wait for the boat to be located as well as the conditions to improve before they can find out if their fishermen are still on it.

“We have nothing to dive on,” said Mr Devitt. “The big fishing boats in the area have sonar and they are going up and down trying to get any sort of an echo. They are doing it in a specific area.”

Local councillor Alan Coleman summed up the mood in the town.

“The reaction locally has been dramatic because this is the first time anyone can remember a trawler from this town going down.

“We now have over a dozen big trawlers in Kinsale but no one expected anything like this to happen especially to some of our younger guys.

“Ger was well known and would have been very popular in Kinsale,” he said.

His Fianna Fáil party colleague Denis O’Donovan agreed: “It is particularly tragic that there is a Kinsale man among them — someone who I knew.

“I suppose the first priority is to try to recover the bodies. The weather until now has been adverse.”

Yesterday, as throughout the weekend, two candles were lit in the local St John’s Church for Ger Bohan and Tomasz Jagla.

Many wreaths were placed on the wall of the church by locals offering their condolences to the families of the two missing men.

At all services over the last four days, prayers were said not just for those lost from the two vessels but also for their families and for the searchers.

At Mass on Saturday, the two fishermen who survived the Honeydew II disaster, Viktoz Lozev and Vladimir Kostyr, were met and embraced by Ger Bohan’s wife Mary and Tomasz’s wife Anita. Yesterday both Lithuanians visited Kinsale Harbour where their boat would have moored in happier times.

Both men still looked shaken as they walked to the end of the pier and watched as the sun shone in Kinsale for one of the few times since the disaster, while members of a local diving club practised their pastime.

The two men then headed into a brief meeting with local ministers as well as coastguard and harbour officials to tell of their experiences and point out on maps where they believed their trawler had gone down.