‘We want them back and won’t stop until they’re found’

GARDA divers will this morning decide if sea conditions are good enough to go into the water at the location where the sunken trawler the Honeydew II was positively identified yesterday.

Coastguard officials confirmed that the wreck of the Honeydew II had been found at about midday, when another trawler grappled its side on the seabed, taking away a handrail which allowed search teams to establish that it was the vessel which sank last Thursday week.

The wreck is lying in about 30 metres of water, 3.6 miles south-east of Ram Head in Ardmore Bay.

Members of the coastguard team who are heading the search for the Honeydew travelled to Ardmore yesterday afternoon, with 11 members of the Garda Water Unit, to assess conditions.

According to Declan Geoghegan of the coastguard, a meeting will take place this morning to assess conditions and decide if the weather and the sea are calm enough to allow a diving operation. He said it was too early to speculate whether the bodies of the two drowned fishermen who were on board the Honeydew II when it sank, Ger Bohan and Tomasz Jagla, might still be in the wreck.

For the community of the Honey Dew II’s harbour home in Kinsale, the developments came as a relief almost a fortnight after the boat’s disappearance.

“We needed a break, there was enough bad weather and other things hampering us over the past two weeks,” said Kinsale Harbour Board chairman Eamon O’Neill.

“This is another piece in the jigsaw, and we’re just keeping our fingers crossed now that they’ll be found. We knew they were fairly close for a couple of days,” he said.

Mr O’Neill said that local seamen and coastal search volunteers had put in hundreds of hours and they were determined to find the two missing men.

“We wanted the two of them back and we won’t stop until they’re found,” he said.