Five days into a search for the missing passengers, one of whom is an American, the U.S. Coast Guard has beefed up its presence by flying in a second C-130 aircraft from Honolulu to join the air and sea search for possible survivors.
Police confirmed that the body of a male was located about 20 miles south of Arno Atoll in the Marshall Islands Wednesday, a day after the partially submerged 13-foot fiberglass boat was located by a U.S. Navy search plane.
But the body was badly decomposed and the fisheries department vessel that sighted it was waiting for a better-equipped vessel to arrive to help get the body out of the water to transport it to hospital in Majuro for identification.
“It’s a male, but the body is so decomposed that we cannot even tell its race,” said Maj. Thomas Heine, captain of the Marshall Islands Sea Patrol’s search and rescue vessel Lomor that returned to port Wednesday night after taking the 13-foot boat on board.
There were four people on the boat that left Arno for Majuro late Friday afternoon for the 20-mile trip, including an American volunteer teacher, James de Brueys, who is from Louisiana and has been in the Marshall Islands since August. One of the three Marshall Islanders on board was a woman in the late stage of pregnancy who was traveling to Majuro to be near the main hospital to deliver her baby. The other two were men, including the elected councilman for the island, Kiotak Abitlom Joream. The Marshall Islanders on the boat were reportedly de Brueys host family on the island of Bikarej, which has a population of around 200 people.
Heine called the combination of Friday’s bad weather and four people on this small boat “an accident waiting to happen.” The boat did not have a radio or any safety equipment such as life preservers.
He described the boat that had four people and a cooler full of fish on board as “no bigger than a bathtub.”
“It is so small, the slightest movement by anyone in the boat and ocean water would have come on board,” he said.
Heine left port Majuro Friday night to travel 150 miles north to Wotje Atoll on the Lomor patrol vessel, but broke off his scheduled trip to begin searching for the small boat on Saturday morning. “I was out on the ocean and the wind on Friday and Saturday, it was howling,” he said. “There was big time wave action.”
The search by the U.S. Coast Guard and a fleet of local vessels was expected to continue Thursday. The Coast Guard dispatched a search and rescue plane Sunday, which was joined Tuesday by a U.S. Navy plane. On Wednesday night, another Coast Guard search and rescue plane flew into Majuro to bolster the search for survivors.
“As long as there is the possibility of a positive result, we will continue the search,” said U.S. Embassy Deputy Chief of Mission Eric Watnik Wednesday night.
