BANGOR – Divers are expected to return today to the cold, swift waters of the Kenduskeag Stream, shifting the focus of the search for the body of a Hampden man farther down the stream.

Joseph Majeau, 77, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, was carried away on Sunday after falling into the stream during a walk along the shore with his family.

Divers are expected today to search by the “shopping cart hole,” an area of the stream, closer to the downtown area, once notorious for the number of shopping carts dumped there.

But as day four ended without searchers finding the body of the retired minister, a search-and-recovery organizer said Wednesday it may be that the fast water carried the man’s body farther out than they initially predicted.

“We’re 95 percent sure he’s not in the area where he went missing,” Richard Bowie, director of the Down East Emergency Medicine Institute, said Wednesday after the day’s search concluded.

Searchers had originally thought it highly probable that Majeau’s body would be located in that area. Most bodies – about 80 percent – remain near where the person went into the water, according to Bowie.

On that premise, searchers on Wednesday scoured a quarter-mile area of the stream below an observation platform by Valley Avenue.

High-resolution photographs taken from a plane early Wednesday morning offered some promising areas to search.

A bend in the stream provided an area of slower moving water, and a photograph showed what searchers thought could be a body. A diver from the Penobscot Emergency Response Team, however, later discovered it was a rock formation.

A searcher on shore found a blue jacket near the water where Majeau went in, but Bowie said this may be a false lead. Majeau was wearing tan pants and a blue jacket, but Majeau’s jacket was fleece, and this one was made from nylon, Bowie said.

While still running fast, the Kenduskeag Stream has subsided from the more dangerous conditions of several days earlier, when the water was about 2 feet deeper and many feet higher along the shore.

Still, the whitecaps on the water surface showed that it still was not easy going in the stream, and the divers, as many as four in the water at one time, sometimes rested on the rock outcroppings, with water swirling around them.

Bangor firefighters, part of the PERT, set up downstream from the divers, with rope ready in case a diver was carried away.

After about four hours in the water, searching eight “hot spots” – discolorations or shapes that look out of place or unnatural – the divers returned to shore Wednesday afternoon and planned to resume their efforts farther down the stream.

“It’s starting to perplex us,” admitted Bowie, who said that Majeau could have been swept quickly farther down the stream than they first expected.

A plastic jug half-filled with water was sent down the stream earlier this week and traveled about a mile down the river in half an hour.

It’s something the search coordinators considered, and they even had searchers on planes, in boats and on shore keeping an eye on the waters of the Penobscot River by Verona and toward Penobscot Bay.

The coordinators, however, are intent on not rushing the search and possibly missing something or endangering the searchers, Bowie said.