An elderly man died at Anstruther harbour over the weekend.
Tragedy struck the picturesque Fife village at 4pm on Saturday. The man’s body was pulled from the water after the alarm was raised by a Kirkcaldy sailor out on his boat some 10 metres from the pier.
Kirkcaldy man Sandy Aitken was on his charter boat Britannia at the time and helped secure the body until the arrival of the RNLI. He described his shock discovery to The Courier.
“I was on board the Britannia when a young couple came down the pier and called out to me,” he said. “I went to speak to them and they asked me, ‘Is that a body in the water?’
“They were thinking it might have been a dummy. I said I didn’t know but would check and I went to the front of the boat to look.
“At that point I thought it looked like a body but it could have been a dummy it was just too far away at that point to be sure.”
Mr Aitken immediately called the coastguard, and the RNLI inshore lifeboat from the local station was on the scene within minutes.
Meanwhile, Mr Aitken had managed to bring the body closer to his boat, and kept it beside the Britannia until the crew arrived.
The crew hauled the man on board the lifeboat and he was transferred to a waiting ambulance. It is not known how long the man had been in the water before his body was discovered.
Mr Aitken added, “I believe his jacket was found on the pier close to where the body was found in the water. I do not know how long he had been in the water.”
However, he added, “We don’t know what has happened, but my guess would be he could either have gone too close to the edge and fallen in or had taken ill.”
Mr Aitken added, “I was on the boat most of the time that afternoon, and I didn’t hear anyone call out.”
He said it had been a nice day on Saturday and the area was quite busy.
“It wasn’t overcrowded but there were quite a number of people going up and down, but I hadn’t seen this man. It is very sad some family has lost somebody.”
A spokesman for the coastguard confirmed they had responded to a report that a body had been discovered in the water near the west pier.
“The body was recovered and passed on to ambulance personnel,” he said.
Fife Constabulary confirmed they were treating the matter as a sudden death and a report would be submitted to the procurator fiscal but that there were no suspicious circumstances.