BIDDEFORD (AP) – The search and rescue teams are gone, but a Connecticut man continues to comb the rocky beaches of Biddeford Pool in search of his missing 20-year-old son.

College student Ryan Matt went missing the night of April 26, when he was last seen leaving a party at about 11 p.m. Since then, his father, Christopher Matt of Plainville, Conn., has looked for any traces of him.

“Every day you think about different things, different places you haven’t been,” Christopher Matt told The Herald of New Britain.

Walking the beach, Matt considers where his son might have gone after the party. “There’s a little walk up here that goes along the cliffs,” he said. “Ryan would come up here a lot.”

Police said Ryan, an Eastern Connecticut State University student who had transferred from the University of New England, was drunk late Saturday night when left a home in Biddeford Pool, a seaside neighborhood.

For two days after he was reported missing, several hundred people and more than a dozen agencies searched for him, using helicopters, planes, boats and search dogs.

Biddeford police have labeled the disappearance a missing person case, and have continued to search the coastline at low tide with all-terrain vehicles.

For Christopher Matt, the search for his son is getting more frustrating by the day.

“One morning I was walking along the beach and I saw a big brown lump of something up ahead,” Christopher Matt said. “It turned out it was just a big seal sunning itself of the rocks. It went running when I got up to it.”

He is helped by his youngest son, 14-year-old Kevin, and his brother-in-law Joe McInnes.

“Periodically he just kind of loses it a little bit,” McInnes said. “Then he just brings himself together. He’s stayed strong for the most part.”

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