At least four people have died and dozens are missing after a ferry carrying 65 people sank on its way to the Indonesian resort island of Bali, according to local police.

The vessel sank before midnight on Wednesday in the Bali Strait as it sailed to a port in the north of the famous holiday island, departing from Banyuwangi, a town on Indonesia’s main island of Java, the local search and rescue agency in Surabaya said in a statement.

Rama Samtama Putra, Banyuwangi’s police chief, said four people had died and 23 others had been rescued. The boat was carrying 53 passengers and 12 crew members, as well as 22 vehicles, the search and rescue agency said.

“KMP Tunu Pratama Jaya … sank about 25 minutes after weighing anchor,” the agency said. It did not say what might have caused the accident although cabinet secretary Teddy Indra Wijaya later said the cause was “bad weather”.

President Prabowo Subianto, who was on a trip to Saudi Arabia, ordered an immediate emergency response, Teddy said in a statement.

Many of those rescued were initially unconscious after drifting in choppy waters for hours, Rama said.

Nine boats, including two tug boats and two inflatable boats had been searching for the missing people, battling waves up to 2 metres high in the overnight darkness.

Four of the known survivors saved themselves by using the ferry’s lifeboat and were found in the water early on Thursday, the search and rescue agency said.

The ferry from Java to Bali takes around one hour and is often used by people crossing between the islands by car. It was unclear if any foreigners were onboard when the ferry sank.

It is also common in Indonesia for the actual number of passengers on a boat to differ from the manifest, so more passengers may be unaccounted for.

Marine accidents are a regular occurrence in Indonesia, a south-east Asian archipelago of about 17,000 islands, in part due to lax safety standards and sometimes due to bad weather.

In March, a boat carrying 16 people capsized in rough waters off Bali, killing an Australian woman and injuring at least one other person. In 2018, more than 150 people drowned when a ferry sank in one of the world’s deepest lakes on the island of Sumatra.

With Agence France-Presse and Associated Press