Coroner rules in major Tas search case

A Launceston man who went missing in central Tasmania sparking one of the state's biggest search efforts, drowned, a coroner has found.

Ben Wara Plowright, 20, was last seen in May 2015 at the township of Perth and despite a co-ordinated search effort involving hundreds of volunteers and police, his body wasn't recovered until September the same year by kayakers travelling the South Esk River.

"I am unable to say with any degree of certainty how Mr Plowright came to be immersed in the river, however, (multiple factors) including his level of intoxication and the lack of ambient lighting I find that the mechanism involved was most likely an accidental fall," Coroner Duncan Fairley said in findings published on Thursday.