Fishermen’s families hope sala search team can help
THE families of three fishermen who went missing off the Welsh coast are not giving up hope of finding them nearly 40 days since the alarm was raised.
Ross Ballantine, 39, Carl McGrath, 34, and Alan Minard, 20, disappeared off the Conwy coast on January 27 and no trace of them has been seen since.
Now their families have launched a £75,000 fundraising effort and have enlisted the expert who helped find Emilano Sala for a private search to find their loved ones.
Deep water recovery specialist David Mearns has already been in touch with the families and offered his services but the actual equipment needed to carry out the detailed search is costly.
The men were onboard the Nicola Faith, a 10-metre-long boat that failed to return to port in Conwy. Despite a major sea search involving the RNLI, no trace of the boat or the men has been found.
Now a fundraiser has been set up in a bid to help in the efforts to return the men to their families.
So far almost £26,022 has been raised in the week since it was launched and the hope is that enough will be raise to pay for the cost of a private search by the team who found the Cardiff City FC footballer Emiliano Sala.
Ross’s brother James says: “There has been nothing since the alarm was raised that Thursday morning when the alarm was raised that they hadn’t come home. We know that they always followed similar routes and they were the only one fishing for whelks in the area so they were never more than three miles from the coast.
“But the searches have found nothing and we have nothing to go on at the moment. David Mearns has been in touch and that has given us hope and we have had so much support from the local community and beyond.
“We are so grateful because it is so important that we put everything into this final chance to bring them home. We need to get Ross back for his two young boys, they desperately long and wait for his return, and the other families need their loved ones home too.
“It is difficult to manage day to day tasks as we just wait and it is impossible to even begin the grieving process until we get them back with us.”
The Crowdfunding page says: “We are now trying to raise the necessary funds for a private search by experts who we believe have the best chance of enabling us to bring our lads home.
“Not knowing is one of the hardest parts to deal with as it leaves the families with so many unanswered questions. Closure is critical to enable the family’s to move forward, remember the good times rather than worry about what happened on that fateful day.”
David Mearns was a pivotal part of the search to find the wreckage of the plane carrying Emiliano Sala and pilot David Ibbotson.
After the Piper Malibu N264DB vanished from radar near the Channel Islands on January 21, 2019, an official search to find the aircraft and those on board was stood down three days later on January 24.
This prompted a remarkable online fundraising campaign, which saw more than £300,000 pledged to fund a private search so efforts to find Sala and the pilot could continue.
This is where undersea explorer Mearns, dubbed the Shipwreck Hunter, stepped in to coordinate the private search on behalf of the Sala family, and the plane’s wreckage and a body had been found the next day.
Details of the fundraising can be found at: https://www.justgiving.com/ crowdfunding/findthenicolafaith.
PEOPLE in Wales may still not be able to travel far from where they live even after the “stay at home” rule is lifted.
Since December everyone in Wales has been told that they can only go outside their home if they have a reasonable excuse, like work, buying essentials or exercise. And while exercise has been permitted, driving to do so is not.
Two weeks ago, at the last 21-day review, First Minister Mark Drakeford indicated that the stay at home rules would end.
However, it does not automatically mean you will be able to travel as far as you like within Wales after this point.
At the Welsh Government press conference yesterday, Health Minister Vaughan Gething said that the Welsh Government was still considering making people stay within their local areas.
He said: “We have said we may be able to lift stay at home. We are considering what that then means. We are thinking about whether there will be a stay local period or whether there should be travel permitted across the whole of Wales.
“That is a choice that the government needs to make and we haven’t concluded that.
“But there are, I think, very easy to understand arguments about why we would want to have a period of ‘stay local’ before moving to wider travel and it is important to remember that at this point in time the restrictions in England mean that people shouldn’t be travelling from England into Wales.
“We know that the reality of essential travel for work is one thing but there shouldn’t be travel for leisure at this point in time.”
He added that Mr Drakeford would be announcing the new rules on Friday next week.
It would be hard to introduce restrictions on travel for any length of time if the Welsh Government then followed through with its plan to reopen self-catered accommodation at Easter.
Addressing this, Mr Gething said: “I do understand the point about self-contained accommodation and whether that is going to be viable if we still have a stay local period as opposed to wider travel. Those are active considerations for the government.”
Mr Gething also said ministers want to get rates of Covid-19 in Wales “as low as possible” before making any further significant relaxation of restrictions.
He said the Government is due to publish new evidence to explain its way forward out of lockdown, but warned there is a danger in easing rules while mutations of the virus are in circulation.
He said forecasting what restrictions could be eased by the summer is “a real act of astrology”, adding it will be dependent on the public’s behaviour and its effect on transmission during the next few months.
The under-50s adult population will not have entirely received both doses of the vaccine by the middle of June, Mr Gething said, meaning there will still be “a range of people who haven’t been vaccinated who are susceptible to infection”.
He added: “One in four of our hospitalisations are actually people who are under the age of 60, so you can see the potential for harm if we go out of lockdown too quickly.”
A PENSIONER has had her impaired vision restored after her concerned son arranged for an optician home visit during lockdown.
Beryl Close, 75, from Tonypandy, noticed her eyesight had started to worsen so much that it began to have a big impact on her life.
She couldn’t read or see the TV and he was worried that it was affecting her mental health.
Her worried son, Mike, got in touch with a South Wales optician.
During his visit to see Beryl, optometrist and director of home visits in Cardiff and the Vale of Glamorgan for Specsavers, Jason Scaife, found that she had bad cataracts in both eyes and needed surgery.
Cataract removal surgery is a quick procedure, which takes between 15 to 45 minutes, and leaves patients with much brighter and clearer vision.
Having had her surgery at Nuffield Health Hospital in Cardiff Bay to remove the cataracts, Beryl has now made a full recovery.
Mr Scaife said: “Her whole demeanour was different after the operation. It became evidently clear that it was her sight problems that were causing her anxiety.
“She was back to her usual self after the procedure, which was heartwarming to see.
“Beryl’s story is yet another example of why primary health services cannot stall because of Covid-19.
“We completely understand why people may be anxious to seek treatment and medical advice while Covid-19 remains prevalent in our communities, which is why our staff – both those working remotely as well as colleagues in Specsavers stores – have worked hard to ensure we are Covid-secure at all times.”