Family says instructor in paragliding tragedy wasn't a risk-taker Police believe they have found the body of one of two paragliders who went missing off Victoria's coast. UPDATE: THE prospect of finding a student paraglider missing for nearly 48 hours in Victoria's southwest is grim, police say. The body of Torquay pilot Rob Lithgow, 52, also known as "the flying pastor," was found yesterday afternoon near his paraglider in waters off Nirranda, 244km southwest of Melbourne. He was still strapped into his harness. His South Australian tandem student, 66, remains missing after the lesson on Saturday. Police divers will search the waters near the Bay of Islands and Narrinda for the missing man. Sergeant Scott Dower from the Victoria Police Search and Rescue squad said he did not have high hopes of finding the man alive. Rob Lithgow (above and inset) has died and his student is missing after a freak paragliding accident near Warrnambool. "It is bleak and grim whatever way you look at it, obviously we try to provide some closure to the family and will locate what we need to locate," he told 3AW radio. Sgt Dower said waves of 1m to 2m meant divers could search the area, which is unusual for that stretch of coastline. "Conditions at the moment are quite good and there are not a lot of days in the year you can dive around here," he said. The water clarity is good so we will make the most of it. Sgt Dower said the pair would have been strapped together and may have had difficulty getting out of the harness when they hit the water. Mr Lithgow's wife Kate said her husband, a father of four and part-time pastor, was always safety-conscious and had got himself out of sticky situations before. He always has a contingency plan. He is a careful flyer that does not take risks," she said before his body was found. He has had incidents before where he has had to land in places that are not ideal and has had to hike out. Mr Lithgow was a chief flight instructor at his Torquay hang-gliding and paragliding school and had more than 40 years' flying experience. He spent six months in 2007 travelling with his family up the east coast of Australia talking at churches about the connection between "flying and faith," his website says. Police search for the missing student. Picture: Robin Sharrock Experts are baffled about how the experienced pilot came to grief in relatively benign flying conditions and in an area he knew well. Bureau of Meteorology duty forecaster Dean Stewart said southwesterly gusts up to 18km/h were reported in Port Fairy about 2.30pm on Saturday, near where the pair went missing. "They weren't particularly strong, particularly for that area of the Victorian coast," he said. Hang Gliding Federation of Australia operations manager John Twomey said Mr Lithgow should have been able to manage the winds. He should have been able to maintain height with the winds and lift. He is a very proficient pilot and would have thousands of paragliding hours and hundreds upon hundreds of hours in paragliding tandem," he said. Friends of Mr Lithgow have taken to social media sites to pay tribute to the "devoted husband and proud family man." In 2006 Mr Lithgow, who grew up in Papua New Guinea, told the Herald Sun he made his first hang-glider out of bits of bamboo, aluminium chairs and anything else he could find. His passion for hang-gliders coincided with the boom in the sport, which took off in the 1970s.