Durban - Families whose loved ones were on the catamaran Sunsail that went missing in the Indian Ocean in January, are now considering having the three men declared dead.
While they have not given up hope that they could still get answers about what happened to them, Phillipa Savage, whose brother Anthony Murray, 58, was the captain, said they had to face the hard reality that they were not coming back.
“It’s been hard but the hope that they might have been stranded on an island somewhere diminishes each day,” she said.
The Sunsail left Cape Town in December on a delivery trip to Thailand and the three yatchsmen, Murray and Durban’s Reg Robertson, 59, and Jaryd Payne, 25, last made contact with their families on January 18.
In February an “all-ships broadcast” seeking sightings reports, was activated by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority. A month later an online global search was launched by the satellite and crowdsourcing platform Tomnod, but none of the objects tagged by tens of thousands of participants were the missing yacht, identifiable debris or a life raft.
Sunsail’s emergency radio beacon had not been deployed.
“As time went on we had hopes that we would at least find the remains of the vessel so that it could be investigated for clues on what happened but each time we think we might have a lead nothing comes of it,” Savage said.
The catamaran’s owners Tui Marine, the US-based world maritime leisure company, had sent a boat to search for the capsized hull of a vessel spotted by a ship 600 nautical miles off Port Louis, in Mauritius, in May.
Savage said they were not going to find closure until they had a memorial for the men they loved, but first they had to go to court to prove why they had were no longer alive and had to be declared dead.
“It doesn’t get easier. Having someone you love declared dead means you’ve given up hope of ever seeing them,” she said.
Savage said they suspected that the men could have been caught in a cyclone, because Murray and Robertson were both experienced sailors who could handle most challenges on the world’s oceans.
The Mercury