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Rescue ships continue searching for six people missing from a cutter which sank July 14 off Kamchatka’s eastern coast.

The cutter Dava, with reportedly 20 people on board, was traveling from the town of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky to the village of Krutogorovo when it suddenly sank near the Kuzachin Cape.

The distressed vessel was spotted by the ship Captain Sergeyevsky and the fishing boat Sivind, which rescued nine people, including the captain; another five people were found dead. The rescued victims were taken to the town of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.

According to Dava’s captain, the ship went down due to a sudden waterflooding of a stern hold. The boat sank within ten minutes, he said.

The search operation for the missing consists of 11 rescue and fishing boats, a press statement from Kamchatka’s Department for Emergency Situations reported.

According to preliminary information, the tragedy occurred due to the cutter overloading, Kamchatka’s Transport Prosecutor’s Office said. Dava, registered as a pleasure cruiser, can hold a maximum of 12 passengers with a maximum permissible cargo weight of 25 tons. The cutter was transporting 40 tons of cargo, nearly twice its limit.

The prosecutor’s office launched a criminal case on violation of safety regulations leading to deaths.

Meanwhile, in an unrelated incident, on July 15 a Chinese fishing boat rescued the missing captain of a Russian floating dock who spent over 24 hours in the East China Sea.

The captain went missing on July 14 after the dock, which was being towed with 11 people on board from Vladivostok to the Vietnamese port of Vung Tau by two Russian tugboats, received a shell-hole in a heavy storm and sank 30 miles off the Chinese coast. Ten members of the dock’s crew evacuated from the dock on life rafts and were immediately saved by the tugboats.

The search for the captain was carried out by the tugboats and the Chinese fishing boat.

The captain’s condition is reported as satisfactory, a statement from Vladivostok’s Rescue Center said. Currently, the tugboats with the rescued sailors are heading back to Vladivostok.

From the National News Agency, Regnum, Ria-Novosti and Vostok Media