The search for missing publisher and former diplomat Philip Merrill continued Thursday, with boats, helicopters and high-tech sonar equipment combing about 100 square miles of the Chesapeake Bay.
After days of fruitless searching, the Maryland Natural Resources Police were optimistic that increased boater traffic over the weekend might help them locate Merrill, who likely drowned during a routine sailing excursion from his home in Arnold to Kent Island on Saturday. Merrill?s empty boat was found near Plum Point that evening with the sails up and the engine off.
“There will be a lot more sets of eyes out there for those surface searches, so there is a greater opportunity for someone to see something in the water,” said Sgt. Ken Turner, a spokesman for the Natural Resources Police.
But Turner said the department?s best tool for finding Merrill is the side-scan sonar, a device that captures real-time images of the bottom of the Bay using sound waves. The $30,000 sonar device uses a three-foot “fish,” which is hung over a boat and extends sound waves in either direction at the floor of the Bay. When the sound waves hit an object, they bounce back to the fish and generate an image on a computer screen on the boat. Cpl. Paul Carey, who was conducting searches for the Natural Resources police this week, said crews were getting clear images of the bottom of the Bay because of good water clarity.
One sonar can cover about three square miles a day. On Thursday morning, Natural Resources police had scanned about 18 square miles of the ground near the Bay Bridge.
Along with Baltimore City and Anne Arundel County, the Natural Resources Police were also conducting surface searches of the water with boats, and flight searches with helicopters.
Turner said the search for Merrill was not out of the ordinary, that the same amount of resources would be dedicated to finding any missing person, and that the “very large area” police were searching necessitated the resources being used.
