The sister of tragic kayaker, Dominic Jackson, who died last month, has spoken of the overwhelming kindness and generosity she has received since arriving in the north-east – and talked about the poignant last photos found on his phone.
Mr Jackson, 35, died on a solo kayak trip after setting off from Portsoy on Saturday, February 4. His disappearance sparked a massive land, sea and air search until his body was recovered from the water near Lybster five days later.
His sister, Ellie Jackson immediately launched an online fundraising drive to create a charity “PlanB” in her brother’s name to promote the use of Personal Locator Beacons.
Originally from Uckfield in Sussex, Mr Jackson was working as a landscape gardener in the north east.
His funeral was held at Fettercairn Church earlier this month and his sister, who now lives in Australia, has since been spending time in the north-east re-tracing her brother’s last steps.
She said: “The funeral last weekend went brilliantly as far as it could – it was nice to meet all Dom’s friends and finally put faces to names. He had spoken so much about all of them.”
After visiting Portsoy with her father, Miss Jackson, added: “It now puts it into a whole other perspective. To see the terrain all the searchers were dealing with – it’s insane how they managed to do all that.
“It has been a strange couple of weeks, but the characters of the communities and the people in them are what’s made this whole thing so much more real and so much easier to deal with.”
After meeting with personnel from the RNLI in Wick and the coastguards in Banff, Miss Jackson revealed she was overwhelmed by their search efforts.
She said: “The coastguard team said that, even when a local person went missing, they had never had such a turn-out as with my brother – there were hundreds of people volunteering all around the cliff area.”
Photos recovered from Mr Jackson’s phone have confirmed the calm weather conditions on the morning he set out.
Miss Jackson described seeing them as “very hard” and added: “It confirmed everything we thought – conditions weren’t that bad that day. He popped out for a short paddle, but the changeable weather just caught him out.”
Miss Jackson is now considering moving back to the UK in order to get her new charity off the ground after raising more than £16,000.