Searchers hopeful about finding man

BANGOR – As the waters of the Kenduskeag Stream continued to recede Friday, hopes for finding the body of a missing Hampden man were increasing, a search official said.

Searchers have eliminated some areas. Improved conditions, including sun and shallower waters, are expected make the search easier.

“The chances of finding him increase each day,” said Richard Bowie, director of the Down East Emergency Medicine Institute, the volunteer search agency on Friday.

Since Sunday, when retired minister Joe Majeau, 77, fell into the stream, water levels have dropped 3 feet, exposing more of the shore and stream bottom, he said.

“We’re able to walk into areas you wouldn’t even begin to think of during the initial search,” Bowie said.

And with passage of nearly a week, Bowie said, a body under water becomes more buoyant.

Searchers on foot walked Friday along the streamside, looking for signs of the body. A plane is expected to resume its search from the air today.

Searchers aren’t discounting that Majeau was carried quickly down to the Penobscot River, before they could cordon off the Kenduskeag Stream where it reaches the river.

The Bangor harbor master searched Friday along the river down to the Hampden Marina, while a second boat searched further down to the ocean, Bowie said.

A twin engine Beach Baron plane, used by DEEMI, is expected to return to the air today and check along the jagged coastline of Penobscot Bay.

“Maine provides us with that unique problem with a weaving coastline that has to be examined,” Bowie said.

Searchers are frustrated and also anxious, but Bowie said they also are determined and realize it may take longer to find Majeau.

The body of a canoeist lost in a May 7 storm in Cathance Lake in Washington County still has not been found.

And Bowie noted that the search resumed this spring for a 79-year-old man missing since last fall in the woods in Whiting.

If the body of the Hampden man isn’t recovered, the volunteer search agency on Tuesday will bring in a second coordinator, Susanne Kynast, who is out of state working on another search effort in Indianapolis.

A sea kayak instructor and environmental educator, Kynast is a “cold case worker” and will go over the search from its start, Bowie said. A model she developed helped find wreckage in the Cathance Lake case, he said.