A funeral for an experienced fishing guide and father of three is to be held in Deer Lake, N.L., today, one week after a floatplane that he and six others were on board crashed into a lake in Labrador.
An obituary for Dwayne Winsor, 47, by Parsons Funeral Home announced his July 15 death and featured tributes from his wide circle of friends and family.
Winsor was a guide at Three Rivers Lodge, the starting point for last Monday’s fishing excursion to Mistastin Lake that never returned to the lodge. Debris from the de Havilland DHC-2 Beaver plane was spotted in the water last Tuesday.
A short biography of Winsor on the Three Rivers Lodge website describes him as a guide with 20 years of experience in the Labrador bush, who shared the river with guests and had a knack with a fishing net.
Three bodies, including Winsor’s, have since been recovered, while four men, including Quebec pilot Gilles Morin, American brothers Matthew Weaver and John Weaver III and another fishing guide from Newfoundland and Labrador are still missing.
An RCMP spokesperson said police divers searched the water at Mistastin Lake, about 100 kilometres southwest of Nain, over the weekend, but so far none of four missing men have been found.
“While the plane was visible from the air early last week, it is believed that high winds and heavy rains contributed to the plane sinking prior to the RCMP expert divers and investigators getting to the scene with the required equipment for comprehensive searching,” the RCMP said in a statement Monday.
“Objects of interest in the lake have been identified through the use of side-scanning sonar and will be investigated by divers today. The RCMP cannot speculate on what these objects are.”
The cause of the crash is still unknown.
— With Global News files