Here are a few observations from my use of a non-DSC VHF radio plus a standalone GPS unit during a
rescue last summer:
I. Describing location. In the thread above, John Abercrombie mentions tracking and describing his location not by lat/long but by reference to known points,
e.g., “about one mile south of XXXX island.”
During my rescue, I broadcast what I thought was a precise and unambiguous location along the lines John describes: “north jetty, at the east end of the jetty, a hundred yards from the jetty, and being carried westward by the current.” As it turns out, however, there are two distinct points that can each plausibly be described as the east end of the north jetty. The two points are more than a mile apart and, from certain angles, do not lie within line-of-sight of one another. The coast guard could not figure out where I was based on my description, while I, in turn, could not figure out what was so damn hard about searching the north jetty.
II. Reading and reciting coordinates. Earlier in this thread, John and Paul describe the difficulty of reading lat/long off a GPS unit. First, the information is sometimes buried several menus deep. Second, upon activation, the unit will erroneously give its previous location as its current location until the unit locks on to the signal, and it is not always obvious when signal lock-on has occurred. Third, depending how your display is configured, it is possible to confuse the destination coordinates with the location coordinates. (Confusion of this nature was a contributing factor to a
friendly fire incident involving US forces in Afghanistan in 2014.)
Finally, as I discovered during my rescue, it’s a challenge to recite a long string of digits in an intelligible manner while waves are breaking over your head. Also, a standalone GPS demands the use of both hands, one for the radio, one for the GPS, leaving no free hands to hold on to the boat or the paddle.
III. Transmitting. As Jim notes, my transmissions gradually became garbled and eventually ceased altogether as water increasingly muffled the microphone. George Gronseth of the Kayak Academy in Issaquah, a co-author of
Deep Trouble, has long complained that radios marketed as waterproof aren’t actually suitable for the rigors of kayaking. At most,
he writes, “if the only time your radio ever gets exposed to water is in a single emergency where you had to take it out of the bag to use it, then most radios that are rated as ‘submersible’ (i.e. per IPX8 or JIS7) would probably function long enough at the surface of the water to get a call out for help.”
My so-called submersible radio did, indeed, survive submersion just barely long enough to make the call. But if it had taken another ten minutes to sort out the confusion surrounding my location, my radio would have been inadequate. (Even in that event, however, I still had a PLB, a backup radio, multiple species of flare including large parachute flares, an air horn, and a cell phone; plus people on shore had already seen me and were yelling and calling for help.)
As Phil and others suggest in the thread above, each of these difficulties could have been avoided by use of a DSC radio or a PLB. In the end, however, the difficulties I experienced turned out to be harmless. In fact, although I carried a PLB on me, I did not activate it, since it was always clear I was going to be rescued. And of course, DSC and PLB each introduce new weaknesses of their own. DSC drains your battery during non-emergency use; handheld DSC units take longer to acquire the GPS signal than a standalone GPS unit does; a PLB can’t confirm whether your distress signal has actually been received, etc., etc.
Someday, they’ll make a gadget where you can just push a button that says, “Solve all my problems right now.” But, as Andrew notes, the gadgets we have today do not remotely work that well. As I discovered in a harmless fashion, and as James Lesemann of Everett discovered in a fatal fashion, our gadgets fail under the very conditions that cause us to need them.
I’ve sent the coast guard a Freedom of Information Act request for any recordings of my distress call and the subsequent radio traffic. If Rescue 21 retained it, I’ll post it on WCP … unless I sound like a total goober on the tape, in which case forget it.
Alex