Make the Call Count—Know Your
Location
by Tom Rau
It can’t be over-stressed how important it is for boaters to know their location, especially if they need immediate assistance. Some boaters, however, labor under the illusion that when they call the Coast Guard, by some magical means the radio watchstander can determine the caller’s location.
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| You are Here! You are Here! |
How pretty to think so, but it ain’t so. The boater is the only one who can
provide his or her location on the water.
Unfortunately, far too often recreational boaters are unable to provide an
accurate position, which finds the Coast Guard and other rescue agencies
depleting resources and time conducting needless searches: lost time and
effort that could prove fatal to a wayward boater.
Lieutenant Commander Chris Day, Coast Guard Station Traverse Air, drives
home this point while conducting public safety seminars. The veteran Coast
Guard aviator conducts a drill he calls “make the call count.” Using a
hand-held tape recorder, he asks participants to pretend it’s a marine radio
and they are transmitting a Mayday over Channel 16, the International
Hailing and Distress frequency. Commander Day then selects someone from the
group to issue a Mayday. Five to seven seconds into the broadcast, he
switches off the tape recorder, simulating a dead radio for whatever
reasons. Then he plays back the brief segment. Participants are stunned how
they wasted precious time communicating frivolous information. “Make the
call count,” he stresses: “Mayday, Mayday I’m five miles off Betsy Point,
end transmission. That’s enough information to launch Coast Guard boats and
aircraft to process a successful rescue,” said Day.
Two fishermen whose 35-foot fishing boat sank off Ludington Harbor on April
12, 2005 late at night could well have been in the audience to reap the
Commander’s life-saving advice, for in the few moments before their boat
went down, they fired off a Mayday that provided the following information
in less than ten seconds: location, number of people aboard and nature of
distress. Text book perfect and it saved their lives. As he slipped on his
anti exposure suit, one crewman was going down with the boat, but due to the
suit’s buoyancy he popped to the surface after ascending twenty feet below
the surface, according to Mat Herrmann, the Coast Guardsman coxswain who
rescued the pair.
It took twenty-two minutes from the time Group Grand Haven received the
Mayday, to the time the Coast Guard Ludington crew aboard a 30-foot rescue
boat reached the two fishermen bobbing in 35-degree water in 3-4 foot seas
approximately 5.5 nautical miles northwest of Ludington Harbor, the GPS
position provided in the Mayday. I spoke with Joe Loverti, the radio
operator at Group Grand Haven who intercepted the initial call, and he told
me a crewman immediately provided the boat’s position (range and bearing to
Ludington Harbor and latitude and longitude) and in seconds the transmission
ended. Moments later he received a second call from the operator, who again
passed his location and that the boat was going down. End transmission.
On May 14, 2005, in another spectacular “make the call count” rescue, a
Coast Guard boat crew from Station Kenosha, Wisconsin, pulled three
fishermen from the waters off Kenosha in early evening after a crewman fired
off an urgent Mayday. Both Station Kenosha and Group Milwaukee intercepted
the urgent call for help, which carried the boat’s latitude and longitude (4
nautical miles west of Kenosha), number of people aboard, and that was it
was rapidly taking on water. Station Kenosha immediately launched a 41-foot
rescue boat and 16 minutes later, after pounding through four-foot seas,
reached the three fishermen clinging to their overturned19-foot aluminum
boat in 45-degree water. From near by Illinois, a Winthrop Harbor police
helicopter crew also responded to the Channel 16 Mayday and was the first to
reach the overturned craft. The copter hovered overhead, awaiting the Coast
Guard boat.
| Boat Smart Brief: “These guys did everything right: they immediately provided their location, they wore life jackets, and they fired off a flare,” said Coast Guardsman Ben Spafford, the coxswain aboard the rescue boat. Also, I might add the crewman wisely used Channel 16 and not a cell phone, which alerted the maritime community at large, including the Winthrop Harbor police helicopter. In both Mayday cases, the people in the water (PIW) were wearing lifejackets or survival suits; however, the PIWs’ flotation devices did not carry night illumination devices like a strobe light or glow stick, a must for night-time boating. The survival suits did, however, carry reflective material that the search light on the Ludington rescue boat picked up, which lead to the fishermen’s rescue. Both cases also reinforced an observation that I have witnessed over nineteen years of writing Boat Smart columns and as a Coast Guard rescue responder: boats can sink in a heartbeat and often do.
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Tom Rau is a long-time Coast Guard rescue responder and syndicated boating
safety columnist.
Look for his book, Boat Smart Chronicles, a shocking expose on recreational
boating — reads like a great ship’s log spanning over two decades. It’s
available to order at: www.boatsmart.net,
www.seaworthy.com, www.amazon.com, or through local bookstores.
All contents are copyright (c) 2007 by
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