Fisherman’s chance find saves missing man

By 2.30pm his daughter Cherylann O’Brien and son-in-law Tim O’Brien realised something was amiss when he still wasn’t home.

At 5pm, they started searching for him around town themselves, and by 6.30pm, when they still were not able to find him, they alerted the authorities.

Mr O’Brien said he was able to get his father-in-law on the phone at 6.30pm, and spoke to him for about an hour, where Mr Hood told him he was near water and in bush with lots of prickles.

Mr O’Brien said he drove around the lake blowing the horn of his car and asking Mr Wood if he could hear it, to no avail.

The phone call lasted about an hour, with it ending when police urged him to hang up his phone and call 000 to help them pinpoint his location.

Unfortunately, he didn’t understand the instructions and hung up but did not call police, and that was the last contact his family had.

Police and SES started a search that went throughout the night.

It included a helicopter used to fly over the lake both on Friday night and on Saturday.

It was not until Shepparton’s Shane Knight was fishing on the lake about noon on Saturday that Mr Hood was found.

It was the first time Mr Knight had gone fishing in his boat at Lake Nagambie.

He said as he moved down the river he heard a voice talking in the thick bush from the opposite side of the river.

He looked, but couldn’t see anyone there and initially thought it must have been other fisherman or people picnicking.

However, when he spotted the helicopter overhead he remembered a post he had seen on a community page on Facebook the night before where people were talking about a helicopter at the lake searching for a missing elderly man.

With his “spidey senses” now tingling, Mr Knight went back for a closer look and saw Mr Hood barefoot, covered in scratches and behind a tree near the water’s edge.

“With his Alzheimer’s, he was having a conversation with someone who wasn’t there,” Mr Knight said.

“He wasn’t calling out to get someone’s attention.”

Mr Knight managed to get Mr Hood on to the boat and back to the Kirwan’s Bridge boat ramp — about 11km from his home — where he was reunited with his daughter and son-in-law.

The reluctant hero was pleased to have been able to find Mr Hood and return him to safety.

“It was pretty amazing how far he got,” Mr Knight said.

“Unless you were in really close to the bank and looking through the bushes, you wouldn’t have seen him.”

Mr Knight only bought his boat recently.

His wife, who was against him buying a boat, now thinks it is the “best thing because it saved a man’s life”, Mr Knight said.

Mrs O’Brien was pleased to receive the phone call from police to say her father had been found safe and alive after being missing for 16 hours.

“I couldn’t believe it. It was like my whole world came tumbling down around me and then was put back together again,” Mrs O’Brien said.

“We’re so grateful for him (Mr Knight). If it weren’t for him my father might not have been found.”

Mrs O’Brien said while she had been hoping for a good result, after Mr Hood had told her husband the day earlier that he was thirsty, she “knew the odds were that he wouldn’t be found alive”.

She said her father lived only a few houses away from her, and Mr Hood’s Alzheimer’s medication had been changed.

Mrs O’Brien said she and her husband had only lived in Nagambie for three years, and her father only for one year, but she was thankful for how the community had come together to help.

“There was not a person in the main street that wasn’t looking for Dad,” she said.

“The sense of community here is like that of no other.”