Boating: Planning not to die is a good way to live
We’ve all read the sad stories of boaters who were lost at sea and many of us have wondered; how that could have happened in this day and age. We boaters have bought into the notion that the modern boat is the safest it ever has been, which in fact it is! The infrequency of boating tragedies further enforces this belief and lull boaters into a false sense of security. Just like the guy who crosses the busy street in the middle of the block for months and months and then one day, wham.
The news media also re-enforces this falsehood when they call the skipper of a family pleasure boat a hero just for being dumb lucky. I don’t want to bash the media because I am a fringe member. What I would like to do, for once, is read a Coast Guard report that went something like this:
n “A report of an overdue vessel was received by Station Fort Myers after the small fishing vessel filed a float plan with their families. The CG radio operator sent out a request for vessels in the area to be on the lookout. A commercial fishing boat reported seeing flares near its position near the western horizon.A Helicopter was dispatched from Station Key West and the boat was located at 2 a.m. All passengers were found to be in good shape. The boat was towed into Marathon, Florida.”
It’s a dicey scenario but it could happen, so let’s all pray it happens to you or your neighbor or the next person you sell a boat too!
The Coast Guard Auxiliary is a fantastic group of volunteers and our “Dead End Canal Yacht Club” has several members. I admire them greatly but it’s the uniform thing that keeps me from joining. The auxiliary offers safe boating courses, safety inspections and on the water assistance when commercial assistance is unavailable. What’s not to like?
Yet boaters avoid them like swine flu at the boat ramps when they try to give free safety inspections. All they want to do is make sure you have the proper safety gear like those flares aforementioned in our happy ending scenario. “Maybe some other time,” is the answer they often hear. It is a very foolish attitude.
Many times a year a distressed fishing boat is spotted waving some small object like a white flag. Sometimes they are just offshore and other times they are more than 30 miles or more. Sometimes they are silhouetted by dark clouds of an inland thunderstorm and sometimes they are never found again.
We should feel elated at the lucky rescues and be terribly saddened at the terrible loss but it should almost never happen! Let me repeat that, almost never happen! A properly equipped, distressed vessel should be quickly found even if it is overturned or nearly sunk.
We rarely hear in the news media of the quick rescues. The ‘if it bleeds it leads’ mentality of the press would rather bombard us with a three-day search for a family of four missing offshore.
You boaters know, and you potential boaters will now be told, that there is a magic device that will bring your rescuers directly to you. Never mind the $129.95 VHF radio that many new boat owners pass on because they have cell phones. Never mind the ‘Orion’ 12-Gauge High Performance Alert/Locate Signal Kit in a Waterproof case for a measly $200 that can also save your life!
No, no, no I’m talking about the ‘Mother of all Lifesavers’, ‘the 9-1-1 of the sea’, the last thing a sailor thinks of when he is about to slip into the dark abyss, an EPIRB! It’s proper name is the ‘Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon’ which should be self explanatory. The optimum word is rescue and we should all have one on our boats.
Under the heading of ‘what were they thinking’, I wonder why those two NFL players and their two friends were out there so long. Why weren’t they rescued quickly according to their status as gridiron heroes and top wage earners? No one ever blames a victim but I’d like to point out that an automatic activating EPIRB would have saved three lives.
After all, they were aboard a very expensive, unsinkable boat. Possibly investing in such a great boat may have lulled them into another false sense of security. Lack of experience and training made the situation profoundly worse when they tried to retrieve a ‘stuck’ anchor. And no one insisted they spend $1,500 for an EPIRB or told them they could rent one from the Boat U.S. Foundation for $65 a week. If you’re planning to join the race to Mexico this year, be prepared.
Here is how the EPIRB works; when a top end EPIRB is activated, a signal with the exact location of the device is sent to a satellite and onto the Coast Guard. In a short period of time the Coast Guard responds, most often with a helicopter because when an EPIRB is activated something bad is wrong!
Let’s do the math, $1,500 EPIRB (West Marine discounts nearly a third) divided into the $60,000 cost of the boat, comes out to an increased expenditure of point zero two five percent (.025). Let me double check that, yep it’s right! For the life of me I can’t understand why a wealthy, fairly inexperienced young boater would pass on it if he KNEW about EPIRBS? I don’t want to blame anyone although there seems to be plenty to go around.
The only good that may come out of this event, besides the rescue of one of the four young men, is a lesson that we MUST all learn; bad things can happen anywhere. It’s how you deal with it that makes all the difference.
If you have a comment, good, bad or indifferent please e-mail boatguy Ed at boatguiEd@aol.com. I’d really like to hear from you! Boat safe and have a nice day!