‘We have to cling onto the hope that the men are still in there’

“THE longest days of our lives,” is how a sister of missing fisherman Pat Coady has described the time since 6pm last Wednesday, when the herring boat Pere Charles sank near Hook Head, taking five crewmen with it.

Kelly Coady said yesterday that the families of the five men are hoping against hope that their loved ones will be found inside the 35-metre trawler and that they can be brought home to the Dunmore East community.

“We just have to hope that they’re still in there. That’s all we have to cling on to,” she told the Irish Examiner at the waterfront in Dunmore East yesterday afternoon while, a couple of miles out to sea, navy divers were resuming their recovery operation.

All that the families can do now is pray that the bodies of the five men — Pat Coady, Billy O’Connor, Andriy Dyrin, Pat Hennessy, and his nephew and skipper of the Pere Charles, Tom Hennessy — will be recovered.

However, their hopes were once again dashed yesterday evening as the dive was called off, following a day of bad visibility underwater.

Now it looks like being Sunday at the earliest before another diving operation can be mounted at the location where the trawler went down.

“It’s just heartbreaking for us, waiting this long,” Kelly said. “The family is just trying to hang in there.”

She added that, as long as there’s any word to the contrary, the relatives and friends of the five men will hold onto the belief that they will be found within the structure of the Pere Charles.

“That’s what I’m hoping, and that kind of hope is what we have to have.”

Pat Coady’s own father, Stephen, drowned in an accident last year in Cornwall, while his grandfather, Patrick, was lost in another drowning incident in 1995.

He himself had only returned to fishing recently after spending some years working with the ESB, and Kelly didn’t even know he was on board the Pere Charles until after she heard on Wednesday night that a boat had gone down off Hook Head.

Some family members of the men remained waiting yesterday in the RNLI lifeboat station in Dunmore East, while others preferred to stay at home and hope for word from the dive area near Hook Head, where the Irish Lights vessel the Granuaile remained in position throughout the day after arriving on location on Monday evening.

Micheal Bohan, brother of Ger Bohan, who was skipper of the Honeydew II, which also sank last Thursday night, arrived in Dunmore East yesterday to assist with the search for wreckage from the Kinsale-based trawler which went down with the loss of Ger Bohan and another crew member.

He told reporters that he was appreciative of all of the efforts that have been made by many people to find his brother and the other missing fishermen.