Jan 06 2010
What Family and Friends Should Know About SPOT
Where was SV Interlude?
In my previous posting, On the Spot, I described what went wrong when a wife reported her husband overdue while sailing north along Baja California.
Andrea Scott called the US Coast Guard and told them her husband, Mike Joyce, had failed to send her an agreed-upon position report from his SPOT personal locator beacon. Joyce was single-handing the SV Interlude, a 36′ Catalina heading from Cabo San Lucas and was supposed to check in at Magdalena Bay. No position report was received.
The Coast Guard alerted all interested parties to keep a watch for a “white on white sailboat with green covers… One 53 year old male aboard… checked in via a Spot device 28 Dec NE of Cabo on her voyage from La Paz…”
Behind the scenes, the Coast Guard began to evaluate the situation. It contacted the Mexican navy in preparation for what might have been a rescue attempt, which requires careful negotiations with the Mexican government.
It now has been conformed that search and rescue planning was well underway when the Interlude’s SPOT device finally managed to send a position report from Turtle Bay, 235 nautical miles to the northwest.
Authorities on both sides of the border had taken Andrea’s concerns seriously.
Mexican Armada (navy) had launched a patrol craft to search for SV Interlude. And the US C0ast Guard had a fixed wing C-130 search plan ready for execution the day after INTERLUDE was found.
The "I'm OK" button
Nothing had gone wrong. Skipper Mike Joyce was blissfully unaware of all the activities triggered when his SPOT device had failed to fire three days earlier.
Lt. Tim Martin, of the Alameda, California Rescue Coordination Center told me that “the owner/operator was pressing “OK” on the Spot and all indications were that everything was working normally, but evidently it wasn’t.”
When Andrea Scott did not get the expected OK message she treated it as if it was evidence of serious trouble.
This is an inherent problem with using the SPOT. Unlike an EPIRB (Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacon), the SPOT is a commercial product, unregulated by any government agency. With an EPIRB, the owner registers it with an intergovernmental agency, Cospas-Sarsat, established by the US, Canada, France and the former Soviet Union.
Overview of the EPIRB system
When an EPIRB is triggered, Search and Rescue Centers around the globe go on alert. Every EPIRB owner files an information statement containing all the particulars about the boat – description, size, safety equipment aboard, etc., as well as emergency contact numbers.
There is no “I’m OK” button on it. It’s expensive. The batteries last a couple years and cost about $300 to replace. It’s a serious piece of equipment and its very presence aboard is a sober reminder of what can go wrong.
Not so the SPOT. It’s user-friendly. It can show family and friends where you’ve been, displaying all your OK check-ins on a SPOT webpage.
It has some interesting features that make it more than just a way to call for help – features that also make it prone to failure and misunderstandings.
What happened to SV Interlude is a case in point.
But ironically, had Skipper Mike Joyce configured his SPOT differently, the Coast Guard would have known that all was ok, after all.
All he had to have done was to make sure his wife Andrea had the user-name and password so she could have gotten into his SPOT online account. If Joyce had paid for an optional service, continuous tracking, the Coasties could have seen his entire trail of digital breadcrumbs.
As Lt. Martin wrote me, “If I could’ve got on the FindMeSpot.com website and seen INTERLUDE’s track move in the expected direction, I wouldn’t have needed to go to the same lengths…having the Spot tracking function turned on with all usernames and passwords passed to a land-based contact may have expedited this case.”
It would have been a simple thing to do.
There are still many questions about this story:
1. Why can’t the Coast Guard go directly to the SPOT folks and obtain log-in information?
2. Did Mike Joyce explain to his wife precisely how the device works and provide his log-in info to her?
3. How far did the Coast Guard get to actually launching a search?
4. How frequently does this sort of thing happen?
5. How knowledgeable are SPOT owners in proper use of their devices?
Without clear answers, it’s inevitable that at some point, the number of false alarms are going to put lives in jeopardy.
What happened to the power boater whose wife thought that he had fallen off ht estern while working with the dingy !!!!!!
Aloha Amigo