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LOCAL HERO: Veteran fisherman’s instinct locates sunken vessel, guides rescue teams to site
By Khadidja Ba
(Kaieteur News) – In the aftermath of the MV Barima tragedy, veteran fisherman Haresh Singh, who has spent four decades on the water, proved instrumental in locating the missing, submerged vessel after official search efforts had stalled.
Veteran fisherman Haresh Singh
Speaking with Kaieteur News early Tuesday morning, Singh recounted the tense search, describing how instinct, sharp observation and persistence led him and his crew to the exact spot where the boat had sunk.
When Singh and his crew first set out, the horizon offered no trace of the missing vessel.
“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 drew on decades of experience at sea. Trusting his instincts, he directed his brother to steer toward a subtle oil slick 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, then floating barrels, spray cans, clothing, and personal bags. Soon after, the boat’s orange bowline rose to the surface.
Chilling discoveries and Emergency calls
Acting quickly, Singh’s team hooked onto the floating rope to hold their position over the site. As the boat tugged at the line, air bubbles rose from below, and human remains began surfacing from the wreckage.
The coordinates used to locate the sunken MV Barima.
Unable to reach the Guyana Defence Force (GDF) Coast Guard directly, Singh made urgent calls to Minister Zulfikar Mustapha and Minister Ramraj, pleading for immediate intervention before rough weather and swift currents could sweep the site away.
“I call Minister [Zulfikar] Mustapha, Regional Chairman, and Minister Ramraj… I decided to ask them to send out help as quick as possible,” Singh said, noting that the waters were growing dangerously rough.
It took nearly two hours after Singh’s team pinpointed the location for a Coast Guard vessel to arrive. On arrival, Singh directed authorities to the exact spot, which his team had marked with an anchor line.
Haresh Singh’s boat transporting survivors of the MV Barima tragedy.
The vessel lies in roughly 50 to 55 feet of water, making visual detection virtually impossible without precise local knowledge. Singh voiced frustration with the early response, noting that his team had already rescued 11 survivors from the water days earlier. He said that had authorities acted sooner on the coordinates his team provided, recovery efforts might have progressed faster.
“I don’t think no Coast Guard or nobody could have been finding it,” Singh said. “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 ordeal has taken a heavy physical and emotional toll on the veteran fisherman. Exhausted after helping recover multiple bodies, Singh said his entire body ached from the stress and exertion of the previous day.
Divers were scheduled to descend Tuesday morning to secure lines to the sunken vessel in an effort to tow it ashore. While the odds of finding further survivors grow slimmer by the hour, Singh said the only remaining hope rests on the possibility of air pockets inside the submerged hull.
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