A desperate search for a Brit who fell 100 feet from a deck while on a cruise through the Adriatic Sea has been called off after four days.
Croatian authorities had reported that an unnamed Brit, believed to be a man, aboard the Royal Caribbean’s Explorer of the Seas ship went missing in the early hours of Friday morning after falling off the cruise ship.
According to Croatian news outlet 24Sata, he fell near Jabuka, an island off the coast of Croatia, on the way to Zadar.
Emergency services had been searching the wider area of the Vis archipelago before the search was called off.
Several ships took part in the search after an alarm was raised on the luxury vessel which can carry 3,286 passengers.
The ship (stock photo) was reportedly on a seven-day Greece-Croatia route which departed on Saturday, August 3
A map showing where the emergency services had been searching before the search was called off
The search took place around the Vis Archipelago (stock image)
One passenger on the cruise ship, Nicole Bullock, described how she woke up to an emergency message blaring through the ship.
She wrote online: ‘Woken up on the cruise ship around 3.40am to the emergency message ‘”Oscar Oscar Oscar off the port side”. Man overboard.’
Speaking to MailOnline, Kelvin Cabrera from New York City, who was on the cruise whilst on a family holiday said that after receiving an emergency notification, he saw ‘tender vessels and lifeboats from our ship and Croatian coast guard ships surrounding us all searching for the guy who fell.
The cruise was going from the Greek island of Santorini to Zadar. Kelvin told MailOnline that the Zadar port call was cancelled due to the search.
Rescue teams, which used planes and boats to search for the missing Brit, hoped that he would have been able to survive for longer due to the warmer water during the summer months.
But now that several days have passed, the hope of finding him has diminished.
View of search and rescue operations after a passenger onboard a cruise ship, believed to be a British man, fell overboard
President of the Croatian Sea Captains association said: ‘Since the man has been in the sea for over 40 hours, we are already losing hope. We would all like him to be found, but 40 hours is a very long time and we are losing hope that this search will end successfully.’
This comes as the search for British hiker Tom Doherty who went missing while hiking in the Pyrenees last week was called off on Monday as well.
Doherty, 67, lost contact with his family on Tuesday, August 6, while hiking on the Col d’Escots in Ustou near the ski resort of Guzet, the prosecutor’s office in the nearby town of Foix said.
According to his family, the retired doctor from St Albans was on the final leg of a solo hiking and camping expedition when he sent a flurry of panicked Whatsapp messages, the last of which at 7:07pm read: ‘Help, I’ve fallen and cannot move.’
Mr Doherty’s wife Anne Lyons and daughter Rachel tried desperately to contact him, responding with various texts and calls of their own, but were unable to get through.
‘After five days, we haven’t managed to find him,’ a representative of Foix prosecutor’s office said, adding that an investigation into the man’s disappearance would continue.
Police had been sweeping the Col d’Escots and the surrounding mountains with the help of sniffer dogs and a helicopter between Wednesday and Sunday.
But their search was hampered by a thick blanket of fog that descended on the region last week.
Mr Doherty’s car was located in a parking area not far from Guzet on Wednesday last week, the day after he disappeared.
An examination of the geolocation data on the hiker’s phone proved unhelpful, as he had ventured into an area of steep terrain where telephone reception is unreliable.
But Mr Doherty’s photographs sent into the family WhatsApp chat have helped provide some clues on his whereabouts.
One taken earlier on Tuesday looked down on the Chalet de Beauregard, a prominent rest stop on the Col d’Escots.
A woman who works at the chalet said Mr Doherty was probably an hour’s walk away from the chalet when he took the picture, judging by the distance and the scenery and visible.
Later, Mr Doherty sent a photo from the mountainside that showed how a thick cloud had shrouded his view, along with a one-word caption that read ‘bugger’.
This suggests he may have been trying to navigate through difficult weather conditions when he fell, before sending his final message and call for help just after 7pm on Tuesday evening.
It is not clear how far he walked from the chalet before his accident.