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HILLSBURN, N.S. —
RCMP say an aerial search for five fishermen who were working on a scallop boat when it sank in the Bay of Fundy has not spotted any sign of them as of late morning local time today.
Police had said in a news release on Saturday that a search with a helicopter would be suspended until Sunday, but have since corrected this to say some aerial searching occurred on Saturday and was continuing into Sunday morning.
On Saturday, RCMP air services did an aerial search of the coastline between Digby Gut and Morden via helicopter.
A release said the search did not locate the missing fishermen or debris from the scallop dragger Chief William Saulis, which went down early Tuesday morning.
Police have said that after assessing the terrain and the tide from the air and ground, all ground searching was suspended indefinitely because conditions were determined to be unsafe.
The body of one fisherman was found Tuesday night, but the boat and the other crew members and captain have yet to be found.
The 15-metre scallop dragger is owned by Yarmouth Sea Products, which said in a Thursday news release the boat had been operating out of Digby.
The owners said “an unknown event” caused the vessel to capsize as no distress call is known to have been made by radio.
The Joint Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Halifax was alerted to a problem Tuesday at 5:50 a.m. local time when it received a signal from the boat’s Emergency Positioning Indicating Radio Beacon, a device that is automatically triggered when submerged.
The black box which tracks the vessel’s progress was checked by the company and the firm said it was determined the dragger left the fishing ground at approximately 1 a.m. on Dec. 15.
The company says that on Monday, the forecast indicated that the weather would deteriorate later in the day and into Tuesday and that as a result, vessels departed the fishing grounds in the bay and were heading back to Digby.
The men aboard the missing boat were Aaron Cogswell, Leonard Gabriel, Daniel Forbes, Michael Drake, Eugene Francis and the boat’s captain, Charles Roberts.
Drake’s younger sister, Raelene Carroll, has said in an interview it was her brother whose body was recovered Tuesday.
Drake, 48, was from Fortune, N.L., on the province’s Burin Peninsula, and Carroll said the family was in the process of having his body sent home from Nova Scotia.
The Transportation Safety Board has sent a team to determine what level of inquiry will be carried out.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 20, 2020
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