Joshua Seemu­n­gal

De­spite cov­er­ing a larg­er area, rang­ing from the north and east coasts of Trinidad and all the way to To­ba­go, the fourth day of search­ing for miss­ing div­er Reinal­do Novoa proved un­suc­cess­ful again yes­ter­day.

Sev­er­al search par­ties start­ed search­ing - by land, air and foot - from 6 am but there were no sight­ings of the 66-year-old Novoa.

While mem­bers of both the T&T Air and Coast Guard were part of the search, many of the mem­bers were vol­un­teers who were moved to as­sist in the ef­fort - some us­ing pri­vate boats and planes.

“Every­one in the search right now, in this large search ef­fort, was ei­ther per­son­al­ly touched by my dad or has heard of him in their re­spec­tive cir­cles,” Novoa’s son, Reinal­do Ju­nior, said yes­ter­day.

Ex­press­ing grat­i­tude, he said every­one is work­ing to­geth­er as a unit to try and find Reinal­do Sr.

Ac­cord­ing to Reinal­do Jr, while it is a tense and stress­ful time, he knows there are oth­er fam­i­lies out there fac­ing sim­i­lar pain.

“I know we are not the on­ly fam­i­ly miss­ing a loved one, there are kid­napped chil­dren and adults, and all sorts of things hap­pen­ing all the time. Our prayer is that their fam­i­lies al­so re­ceive equal­ly from the per­sons in charge,” he said.

“Our love goes out to every fam­i­ly miss­ing a loved one. No loss is triv­ial. Let us re­main a one love coun­try and keep help­ing each oth­er out.”

The search ef­fort con­tin­ues to­day and rel­a­tives are seek­ing vol­un­teers to as­sist in look­ing for Reinal­do Sr. They are al­so ur­gent­ly seek­ing ham ra­dio and drone op­er­a­tors.

Novoa, a re­tired nurse and grand­fa­ther of sev­en chil­dren, went miss­ing 18 miles off the coast of Man­zanil­la on Sun­day af­ter­noon while scu­ba div­ing. He was tak­en out to his dive site in a boat by a boat­man ear­li­er that morn­ing.