Missing yachtie's partner focusing energy on search

Paul Janse van Rensburg. Photo / Supplied

The distraught partner of a missing sailor says she has stopped working so she can put all her energy into renewing a hunt for his yacht.

Paul Janse van Rensburg, 40, left Tauranga on March 12 on his 11m steel yacht Tafadzwa to sail to Gisborne where he was due to start a new job as an engineer.

His partner, who wants to be known only as Kristen, said she had every hope his boat remained afloat in the Pacific Ocean.

"Somebody can't just disappear with no evidence of anything. There's got to be something out there."

During her 2-year relationship with Mr Janse van Rensburg, she sailed with him to Fiji. She said he was an excellent yachtsman and had a strong will, which she felt would see him return to land.

"He's really determined. If he wants to do something, no one will stop him."

She and his friends were raising money for a private search and hoped to convince the National Rescue Co-ordination Centre to resume the official search.

"I've put everything on hold. I'm trying to do everything I can to get a search going again," she said.

"We want people across the country to keep an eye out for him at sea. Clubs, fishing vessels, any aeroplanes. It's not only money we need."

The official three-day search was called off after no trace was found of the yacht.

Mr Janse van Rensburg's friends said yesterday that he had sailed in some of the world's most dangerous oceans. Regan Boocock said the support group called "Let's Find Paul" had found hope in survival stories of other yachties lost at sea.

He said British couple Maurice and Maralyn Bailey had survived for 117 days in the Pacific Ocean on a rubber raft in 1973. "Their situation started out just like Paul's - everyone had lost hope. But they endured, in the same ocean that he is probably in."

The group said he could be still on his possibly damaged boat or his life raft.

Another friend, Warwick Gowland, said Tafadzwa was a solid, well-built and well-equipped yacht. The yachtie had plenty of food and water on the yacht and his life raft had 24 days of food and water.

"He would last a long time ... An Orion might not pick that up, but there is also a pretty good chance [it] would."

Mr Gowland said that after studying the wind patterns for the past two weeks they believed he could have been blown outside the area already searched.

"He could even be right up around the tip [of the North Island].

"He has so much experience and he is not an idiot. He is a very intelligent man who knows what to do."

- additional reporting: NZPA