Indonesia teams continued searching Monday for more than 70 people missing after a passenger boat sank off southern Sulawesi island.
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Asikin said the boat was hit by waves more than 3 meters (10 feet) high amid stormy weather about 21 kilometers (13 miles) southeast of Wajo island, causing it to spring a leak.
A fisherman who rescued four of the survivors, Amiruddin, recalled spotting a woman and a boy with floats bobbing on the sea while he was fishing Sunday morning.
Roki Asikin, the head of the local search and rescue force, said powerful waves meant it took three hours to get some survivors to shore.
Three people have been found dead in the Gulf of Bone off South Sulawesi since the vessel with 118 on board ran into trouble on Saturday. Nineteen children, including 14 babies, were on board.
Later in the afternoon, the vessel sent out a distress signal, claiming the ship “had an accident as a result of large waves four to five metres high”, Barata said in a statement.
The ship was sailing from Kolaka in Southeast Sulawesi to Siwa in South Sulawesi.
Operational chief of the local search rescue agency Ivan Ahmad Rizki Titus said the National Search and Rescue Agency was deploying a helicopter and boats, while the navy was sending in warships to join the rescue efforts. A report on the Detik news website said the vessel had sprung a leak about 22km from Siwa port.
Television footage shows family members in waiting anxiously at the Siwa port for their loved ones.
Indonesia is a vast country with over 17,000 islands having population of 250 million.
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In June dozens of tourists were injured in several explosions on a ferry in eastern Indonesia, while more than 20 passengers died and a similar amount never found when a ferry sank in East Java past year.
