At least three people were killed and 24 missing when a wooden-hulled passenger vessel collided with a fishing boat and sank in the Philippines, the coast guard said, DPA reported.
Forty-six people were rescued from the waters around Limbones Island off Cavite province, just south of Manila, where the passenger ferry MV Catalyn B sank after it struck the fishing boat FV Nathalia.
"Our search teams have found three bodies floating near the incident area, but we are still searching for 24 more persons unaccounted for," said Lieutenant Commander Armand Balilo, a coast guard spokesman.
Balilo said the three fatalities were a woman and two men, one aged 72, who were all wearing life vests from the boat.
The coast guard said the Catalyn was carrying 14 crew members and 59 passengers when it left Manila Wednesday evening for Lubang Island, 150 kilometres south-west of the capital.
But the Catalyn collided with a fishing vessel halfway through the journey.
Balilo said an investigation would be conducted to determine the cause of the accident, which occurred as Filipinos rushed home to the provinces for Christmas Eve.
"Our investigators are still in the process of getting information from the crews of the ill-fated boats so we cannot give any statements yet on the cause," he said.
There was no weather disturbance in the area and the Catalyn was not overloaded when the accident occurred, the coast guard said. The vessel was authorized to carry 126 passengers.
Some survivors said the Catalyn struck the fishing boat because its captain fell asleep during the trip.
"The captain must have been sleeping because the fishing boat was well lighted," said one passenger who survived, Billy Merato. "The seas were very calm and you could clearly see the fishing boat."
Dozens of relatives of passengers on the Catalyn rushed to the coast guard headquarters in Manila to find out if their loved ones were among those rescued.
One man said his sister and brother-in-law were still missing.
"They were on their way to Lubang to attend the wake of my other sister who died," he said. "This is a terrible thing to happen on Christmas Eve."
Sea travel is a major mode of transportation in the Philippines, an archipelago of more than 7,000 islands. Accidents are frequent due to bad weather, poorly maintained boats and weak enforcement of safety regulations.
In September, a passenger ferry carrying 959 people sank off the southern Philippines, killing 10 people.
In June 2008, more than 800 passengers drowned when a passenger ferry sank off the central Philippines at the height of Typhoon Fengshen.
The country was the site of the world's worst peacetime shipping disaster in 1987 when more than 4,000 people perished in a collision between the ferry Dona Paz and an oil tanker before Christmas Day.