Yesterday's northwesterly wind stopped the fishermen's search for Teo Bugeja, although the Armed Forces continued scouring the waters for the 11-year-old boy.
Fisheries Cooperative president Raymond Bugeja said he did not know when the fishermen - who have been searching the sea for the past days - will be able to go out to sea again. "It all depends on the weather," he said yesterday.
Meanwhile, an AFM patrol boat and an AB212 helicopter of the Italian Military Mission yesterday continued their search for Teo without success. AFM sources said the search will continue today.
Teo's father Simon - the only one plucked alive from the sea - is still in hospital, although Mr Bugeja said he was recovering well. It is still not known when the funeral of the other three fishermen - Simon's father Karmenu, 61; Noel Carabott, 33; and 21-year-old Somali Abdulrahman Abdala Gedi, will be held.
Fishermen are angry that nobody noticed that the Simshar had disappeared off the radar before the boat was reported overdue on July 12 - two days after it went missing.
"The Simshar had a Vessel Monitoring System on board, which transmits the boat's position to both the Fisheries Department and the AFM every two hours," Mr Bugeja said.
He argued that the alarm should have been raised when the fishing boat stopped transmitting a signal on July 11. "This should have indicated that there was a boat in distress. Those first days were the most crucial," he said, adding that, although the VMS is used mainly for conservation purposes, it also provides a safety net to fishermen.
But Anthony Gruppetta, director general of Veterinary Regulations and Fisheries Conservation and Control, argued that the VMS stops transmitting if the engine is switched off.
Asked how the army had not realised that the Simshar had disappeared off the radar, AFM commander Carmel Vassallo said the army can only see where a boat is at a particular moment without access to back-records. "The only entity that can challenge a boat's position is the fisheries department. We were eventually given the boat's last transmitted position, and found that we had been searching in the right area."
Brigadier Vassallo defended the army's search operation, saying that it had only been informed that the boat was overdue on Saturday, July 12, two days after the boat transmitted its last signal.
Since the AFM was initially searching for a boat, could they have missed people at sea? Brigadier Vassallo agreed that a boat or a life raft are easier to spot than people in the water, although he argued that helicopters are able to circle an area if they suspect there is something.
"It could be that you go over something and miss it, but we definitely did not spot them and leave them there," he said.
Reacting to reports that a helicopter flew over Simon and Teo - when the boy was still with his father - Brigadier Vassallo asked whether after days at sea the man had seen a mirage.
"We did all we could," he said.