Local Hero: 40-Year Veteran Fisherman Locates Submerged Vessel, Triggers Rescue Efforts

Jul 21, 2026 News

Kaieteur News – Speaking directly with Kaieteur News early this morning, Haresh Singh recounted the tense search efforts, detailing how instinct, razor-sharp observation, and sheer perseverance led him and his crew to the exact spot where the vessel sank.

Local Hero: 40-Year Veteran Fisherman Locates Submerged Vessel, Triggers Rescue Efforts

Fisherman, Haresh Singh

When Singh and his crew first headed out, the horizon yielded no immediate trace of the missing boat.

“What I was looking for when I went out there… I was watching to see if we could see the boat,” Singh recalled. “But unfortunately, we never see nothing—not a piece of the boat or anything.”

Refusing to give up, Singh relied on his decades of experience at sea. Trusting his intuition, he told his brother, to navigate toward a subtle slick on the water’s surface near a dock.

“Me mind tell me, ‘You know what? You got to look for a spot of oil.’ So I watch and see a spot of diesel oil outside… about 15 feet from the water outside. I tell my brother, ‘Drive to this part.’ When he drive to that part, I see this oil and this place was rank—rank, rank, rank.”

Moments after easing up the boat’s engine, debris began surfacing rapidly. First, a life jacket popped up, followed by floating barrels, spray cans, clothes, and personal bags. Soon after, the boat’s orange bowline floated up.

Acting quickly, Singh’s team hooked onto the floating rope to secure their position over the site. As the boat tugged at the line, air bubbles rose to the surface, and human bodies began floating up from the wreckage.

The coordinates.

Facing delays reaching the Guyana Defence Force (GDF) Coast Guard directly, Singh immediately initiated a series of urgent calls to Minister Zulfikar Mustapha and Minister Ramraj to summon assistance to the scene, including regional authorities, pleading for immediate intervention before rough weather and swift currents swept the site away.

It took nearly two hours after Singh’s team established the location for a Coast Guard vessel to arrive. Upon arrival, Singh directed the authorities to the exact spot, marked carefully with an anchor line.

The missing vessel sits in roughly 50 to 55 feet of water, making visual detection virtually impossible without precise local knowledge. Singh expressed frustration with early response protocols, noting that his team had previously rescued 11 survivors from the water on Sunday. He stressed that had authorities acted on the exact coordinates provided earlier, recovery operations might have progressed faster.

“I don’t think no Coast Guard or nobody could have been finding it,” Singh stated. “You don’t have no signal or nothing there to pick up. It has to be somebody who knows the area and knows what to look for… We really, really worked hard to find it.”

The harrowing experience has taken a heavy physical and emotional toll on the veteran fisherman. Suffering from physical exhaustion after assisting in the recovery of multiple bodies, Singh noted that his entire body was aching from the exertion and stress of the previous day.

Divers were scheduled to go down this morning to secure lines to the sunken boat in an attempt to tow it to shore. While the odds of finding further survivors grow slim by the hour, Singh noted that the only remaining hope rests on the possibility of air pockets inside the submerged vessel.

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Local Hero, MV Barima, Rescue Efforts, Submerged Vessel, Veteran Fisherman

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