LAKE OCONEE, Ga. — Saturday marks one month since Gary Jones and his fiancée Joycelyn Wilson vanished while boating on Lake Oconee. Wilson’s body was recovered the next day, but crews are still looking for Jones’ body.
Channel 2′s Bryan Mims was at Lake Oconee on Saturday morning as a Wisconsin-based expert and his specialized search team joined the search to help the family get results and some closure.
Keith Cormican runs a nonprofit called Bruce’s Legacy, which is funded by donations and named for his late brother.
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Richard Pickering, who is coordinating the volunteer search, said Cormican is one of the best underwater search experts in the country.
“In difficult cases like this, we reach out to nationally-acclaimed SONAR operators,” Pickering explained.
He says Cormican has $300,000 of equipment on his boat, including a torpedo-shaped SONAR unit that hovers over the bottom of the lake, as well as a remote-operated vehicle with a light and a camera.
“It’s an $85,000 piece of equipment and it allows them to go down into the water with a cable and to skim along the bottom of the lake in looking, in trying to locate the body,” Pickering said.
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Searchers have narrowed the area to roughly the size of two football fields, but the water is dark, deep and thick with dead trees.
“That’s what we dove last weekend,” volunteer diver Buck Buchanan said. “We dove in all trees and all timber. We literally went into entanglements knowing they’re entanglements.”
Buchanan says he and several other divers are ready to go in if Cormican finds a lead.
“By bringing him in, it takes it to a whole other level of expertise. So we have high expectations and high hopes,” Pickering said.
Cormican plans to stay for several days as the search continues each day.
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