Search continues for fisherman

LOCAL boats continued to scour the waters off the west Cork coast for the Egyptian fisherman who fell overboard on Saturday morning.

The man fell from the 22-metre Union Hall-based trawler, Janireh, which was hauling its nets 15km south/south-west of the Fastnet Rock at around 1.45am.

The vessel’s owners, Christopher and Denis Deasy, turned the boat to stern in a bid to rescue him from the water, their nets became caught in its propellers, rendering it powerless. They threw him a lifebuoy but he slid below the surface.

The fisherman, who was in his 30s and was living in Skibbereen, had only recently married his Dublin girlfriend in a civil ceremony.

Valentia Coastguard confirmed that six trawlers from Union Hall were continuing to search the waters for the man’s body using their trawl nets. The Air Corp’s fixed wing Casa aircraft from Baldonnell also continued to search.

A spokesman for the coastguard said given that the man was not wearing a survival suit, he could not have survived longer than two to three hours in the water so they had to consider the operation as a recovery effort.

The search is likely to continue for a number of days.