UPDATE: No sightings after a full second day of searching for missing kayak couple off Phuket
PHOTOS: Phuket People’s Voice
Air and sea searches continue today as up to one hundred people are now involved in the search for a Polish tourist and his Thai girlfriend who went missing after they, and their kayak, went missing off Phuket on Saturday evening. Read that story HERE.
26 year old Mateusz Juszkiewicz from Poland and a female Thai friend, 23 year old Werakan Sirirakon from Nakon Sawan managed to alert their friends that they were in difficulty with a mobile phone call before contact was lost with the pair as the others arrived back at Yanui Beach around 6.30pm on Saturday evening.
Two days of extensive searching, up to 20 nautical miles off the coast of Phuket, including around the Similans and Koh Racha, have not turned up any fresh sightings or information about the missing pair.
Conditions have been warm but there has been persistent moderate to fresh offshore winds over the past three days.
When police received information about the incident on Saturday evening, a search was launched immediately by the Royal Thai Navy, the tourist police, the Phuket provincial public disaster mitigation office and Rawai municipal office. Efforts have concentrated on the sea currents and winds and where they may have carried the couple and their kayak.
Kamonchai Khuadkaew, the Kamnan of Tambon Rawai, led rescue workers on a foot search along the rocky shoreline of nearby Rawai Beach on Sunday and other officials have conducted searches along other beaches and shorelines around southern Phuket.
The pair headed out from Ya Nui Beach, just south of Nai Harn Beach, on Saturday afternoon, in the company of other friends who had hired kayaks with them. They headed out to nearby Koh Man for a short canoeing expedition.
