Workers watch trawler tragedy

Press, 7 October 1988, Page 1

Workers watch trawler tragedy

By

PAT TAYLOR

in Greymouth

Railway workers shunting on Greymouth wharf yesterday saw the 13.7 m fishing trawler Marina May founder on the bar at the port entrance. The trawler’s two occupants, Raymond Thomas Henham, aged 36, of Taylorville, north of Greymouth, the skipper, and his crewman, Alan Vincent Ferguson, aged 28, of Greymouth, are missing, feared drowned. Mr Rick Apanui, a locomotive driver and part-time announcer on Radio Scenicland, said he saw the trawler coming over the bar, trying to enter the port against a still partially flooded river. He saw waves breaking over it and then a big wave crashed over the stern. The trawler disappeared. When he next saw it, it was being churned about in the water. The lifeboat “popped up” and drifted out to sea. It was washed up later on Cobden beach on the northern side of the harbour entrance. Mr Apanui and his fellow workers ran to tell the police. The lifeboat carried no identification and at first was thought to be from a Nelson-based trawler. But further inquiries established that the missing trawler was the Marina May, which had left Okarito the previous night after fishing at Jackson Bav. Searches of the beaches for the missing men will continue.