Search Postponed Until Wednesday for Missing Boater [VIDEO]

This article was last updated at 8:16 p.m. Tuesday

As of 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, emergency crews had postponed a search for a 75-year-old Woodbridge man whose scull row boat capsized Monday on the Housatonic River.

At this point, unfortunately, police do not expect to bring Richard Fiske out alive. Still, the search will begin again Wednesday morning around 8.

"It is a recovery effort at this point," said Sgt. Ray Ramos of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection police.

Two boats combed the Housatonic River from the Stevenson Dam on the Oxford-Monroe line into Shelton near Indian Well State Park on Tuesday; that area was shut down to the public. As of 1:45 p.m., police had not found Fiske's body and didn't have much more information than they did on Monday afternoon, when news crews from all over the state flocked to the Oxford-Seymour line to get the latest news. More than 50 firefighters from Derby, Newtown, Oxford, Seymour and Shelton responded on Monday but were called off scene just before 9 p.m. Monday when state police postponed the search for the evening, indicating the effort had turned from a rescue operation to a recovery effort.

The search on Monday stretched far and wide along at least four towns in the Naugatuck Valley and included rescuers on boats with sonar scanners inside the water, all-terrain riders and walkers on the river banks and an air search by at least two helicopters, including one from the U.S. Coast Guard and one from the state police. Though there were far fewer people searching on Tuesday, the area the search encompassed was similar. Several volunteers are helping police and the DEEP, Ramos said. The Housatonic Dam upstream from the boating club was shut down while investigators conducted the search; boats containing DEEP workers and state police patrolled the river on Wednesday but didn't bring Fiske's body to shore. 

Ramos said the water temperature on the river as of 9 p.m. Monday was 45 degrees. At that temperature, he said, the Coast Guard estimates Fiske could have survived for about nine hours. Officials now believe Fiske is dead.

DEEP officials said Fiske was first reported missing at 2 p.m. Monday, three-and-a-half hours after he signed out a scull boat from the New Haven Rowing Club on Route 34 in Oxford; a DEEP official said someone saw the capsized boat about 1 p.m. but did not call it in at that point.

Fiske went into the water alone, and state police said Monday they believe he was wearing a floatation device around his waist. That type of device, police said, needs to be pulled manually in order for it to inflate and fully protect the person who is wearing it. Police do not know if that device failed, whether Fiske had a medical issue that caused him to fall out of the boat - though they said all indications are that he was healthy - or if it was something else that caused the boat to capsize. DEEP officials and state police are investigating this as an accident and plan to continue the search until they find Fiske's body.

Fiske, who the Cheshire Herald reports is a former Cheshire resident, is the owner of Ravenswood Homes of Cheshire. The company, which was formed by Richard "Dick" Fiske in 1963, has built more than 2,500 new homes throughout central Connecticut, including many upscale housing developments in Cheshire, Hamden, North Haven, Wallingford, Rocky Hill, Portland and Bethany,according to the company's website.

Fiske, an avid boater, is a member at the well-known boating club at 407 Roosevelt Drive in Oxford, according to Kyle Overturf, director of the State Environmental Conservation Police for the DEEP. Fiske's boat was found overturned a couple hundred yards from the boat launch there where Fiske's friends and family gathered on Tuesday and consoled one another while waiting to hear more from state investigators. His car was also found on Monday near the rowing club. 

Friends and family either could not be contacted or declined to comment to Oxford Patch on Tuesday. Woodbridge land records indicate that a woman named Betsy Fiske, who is believed to be the missing man's wife, owned a home at 26 Inwood Road in Woodbridge. 

A woman who picked up the phone at that address on Tuesday night declined to comment.