Friends of missing yachtie Paul van Rensburg begin a final search for him today but say it will take a miracle for him to be found alive.
Mr van Rensburg, 40, was last seen when he left Tauranga on March 12 on a voyage to Gisborne where he was due to begin a new job. Earlier this week his steel yacht Tafadzwa was found drifting with its self-steering gear still set and its sails torn to shreds, west of the Chatham Islands.
His friends believe he may have been washed overboard as he put a reef in the mainsail in heavy weather in the Bay of Plenty the day he left Tauranga.
After three days of searching which covered 360,000 square kilometres of ocean around East Cape and out to sea, the official search was suspended but a close friend of Mr van Rensburg, Regan Boocock, said today's aerial search of the eastern side of the Bay of Plenty would look at the coastline in the hope he had made it ashore.
Mr Boocock told NZPA that after taking expert advice they believe the Bay of Plenty was the most likely spot for him to have been swept overboard.
He said the area had not been searched as intensely as they would have liked.
"It was brushed over by planes doing wide-sweeping searches looking for a steel hulled yacht."
Mr Boocock was in a helicopter which searched up and down that part of the coast north of Gisborne.
He could not say how the yacht could sail itself to the south after its self-steering gear was probably set to take it on a easterly or north easterly course to take it out of the Bay of Plenty.
"I am not a sailor but we did get an explanation from a sailor and it sounded pretty good to me considering the way we saw the rigging set up."
He said Mr van Rensburg was probably putting a reef in the sail to reduce its power when he was washed overboard.
The wind then took the yacht around East Cape and blew it south to the Chatham Islands.
He said Mr van Rensburg's dog Juanita, which was on the yacht when it was spotted by an air force Orion on a training flight on Sunday, probably survived by drinking rain water which had gathered in the cockpit.
He said today's search was "a miracle of hope".
"It is a far stretch but for us personally it is a way of finishing off what we started."
The yacht and Juanita were both still in the Chatham Islands waiting for Mr van Rensburg's family to arrive from South Africa and decide their future.
Chatham Islands policeman Constable Kane Haerewa told NZPA the yacht's electronic global positioning system could provide vital information.
"That's really the big clue that we're hoping to get some information out of, because really that could tell us when he's possibly gone off course and how long he's been drifting and all that sort of stuff," he said.
Mr Haerewa said the yacht had a lot of safety equipment, including safety harnesses.
