Bad weather hampers Indonesia ferry rescue, dozens still missing

Indonesian rescuers brought ashore on Tuesday nearly two dozen survivors from a passenger ship that capsized off Java island at the weekend, their evacuation delayed by bad weather, officials said.

Dozens of people remain unaccounted for three days after the Virgo Transport 8, which carried 213 passengers and 30 crew, went down early Sunday.

Six people have died while a total of 108 have been rescued alive and 129 others are still missing, the national search and rescue agency, Basarnas, said in a statement Tuesday. The death toll and the missing figure have remained unchanged since Sunday.

The ferry had lost contact with its shipping company shortly after departing from Indonesia's second-largest city of Surabaya on Java island, headed for Banjarmasin on Borneo.

Footage released by the rescue agency on Monday showed the capsized vessel with a part of the hull visible above the water line.

Basarnas said that 22 survivors were brought to a harbour in Banjarmasin on Tuesday, after bad weather had prevented their rescue a day earlier.

"The plan was to evacuate them to Trisakti Port yesterday, but adverse weather conditions prevented us from doing so," local search and rescue agency head I Putu Sudayana told reporters.

"We cannot fight nature, the swells and waves in the area were extremely high."

Four bodies were also airlifted to Banjarmasin Tuesday, Basarnas said.

Nearly 1,100 rescuers, including from the navy and police, were involved in the search operation, which also included more than a dozen vessels and five aircraft, the agency said.

Marine accidents are a regular occurrence in Indonesia, an archipelago of more than 17,000 islands that relies heavily on boat connections for daily transport and tourism.

Lax safety standards and unpredictable weather are the main reasons for the disasters.