Manila - Thirty-nine people were killed and at least six are missing when a motorized wooden boat sank in the eastern Philippines on Tuesday, police said.

According to the boat's manifest, there were 119 people aboard when the accident occurred off Dimasalang town in Masbate province, 420 kilometres south of Manila.

It was not yet clear if the crew members were already included in the manifest, said Senior Superintendent Reuben Sindac, Masbate provincial police commander.

Sindac said local fishermen and police rescued 76 survivors from the waters after the accident.

He said the boat was struck by a sudden gust of wind shortly after leaving the port of Dimasalang, causing it to capsize.

"This was just five kilometres from the shoreline," he said.

Raffy Alejandro, a regional director of the Office of Civil Defence, said coast guard teams have been dispatched in the area to help search for the missing.

In June, a passenger ferry carrying more than 800 people sank in storm-whipped seas off the nearby island of Romblon. Only 56 people survived in one of the worst maritime accidents in the Philippines.

Sea travel is a major mode of transportation in the Philippines, an archipelago of more than 7,000 islands.

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 a ferry and an oil tanker just before Christmas. (dpa)