News
June
2009Garmin's new charts recalled
A bill to cut bills
A matter of life and death
May 2009
Fears for GPS
April 2009
Latest on drink-boat legislation
March 2009
New european radio rules cause problems
February 2009
Russian satnav declared operational
January 2009
121.5MHz EPIRBs obsolete
December 2008
Government revives plans for drink-boat legislation
November 2008
Coastguard safety boat still grounded by Health and Safety rules
Garmin’s
new charts recalledBarely a month after announcing the latest generation of its BlueChart cartography, Garmin has announced a world-wide recall of all the new chart cards.
Errors in the depth data on the new cards is said to have led to two boats running aground in Sweden and Denmark. So far, the problem seems to be confined to Scandinavian waters, but Garmin has tracked it down to changes in the production process, and say that they cannot be certain that other areas are not similarly affected.
As a precautionary measure, all customers who have bought BlueChart g2 and BlueChart g2 Vision chart cards since April 2009 are being advised not to use them, but to contact Garmin or their dealer for a replacement.
When corrected versions of BlueChart g2 and BlueChart g2 Vision are available, they will be issued to affected customers free of charge, but Garmin warn that this may not be until the end of the year. Until then, they are handing out last year’s cards (dated July 2008) as temporary replacements.
Click on http://www8.garmin.com/bluechartrecall to get it straight from the horse's mouth.
A bill to cut bills
The Marine Navigation Aids Bill has had its first reading in the House of Lords.
If it becomes law, the bill would see the responsibility for navigation aids around the UK being taken away from Trinity House, the Northern Lighthouse Board, and the Commissioners for Irish Lights, and handed over to a newly-created body called the Marine Navigation Aids Commission.
The bill is one of the latest moves in a long-running campaign by ship-owners to reduce the amount of “light dues” charged on ships using UK ports – described by Shadow Shipping Minister Julian Brazier as “one great albatross hanging round the neck of the UK shipping industry”.
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A matter of life and death
Epirb manufacturers around the world are urging owners to check that their distress beacons are properly registered, after an incident that cost the lives of six American fishermen.
At the formal investigation into the sinking of the scallop dredger “Lady Mary”, the US Coastguard claimed to have received the first alert from an epirb at 7:07. As usual with non GPS-equipped epirb alerts, this gave two possible positions, but by 0715 a second satellite pass had narrowed it down to an area about sixty five miles south east of Atlantic City.
By 08:20 a rescue helicopter had located the Lady Mary’s empty liferaft. Less than half an hour later, it was on its way back to base, with two bodies and the sole survivor – a 57 year old Mexican called Jose Arias.
Arias’s evidence, however, was that he was woken at about 05:00 by someone shouting that the boat was sinking, and that he found himself in the water within a few minutes. His evidence was backed up by other fishermen who reported having heard faint, garbled Mayday messages on channel 16 at about that time, and by the Lady Mary’s automatic tracking system that had lost contact after recording her position at 05:10.
A question that is taxing all those concerned is why the message from a modern 406MHz epirb – one that was subsequently recovered, tested, and found to be in perfect working order – took two hours to reach the coastguard.
One particularly worrying aspect is that the coastguard’s initial evidence suggested that the Lady Mary’s epirb was “unregistered”. This was immediately refuted by the boat’s owner and by the epirb itself, which carried an official sticker, issued by the coastguard, confirming that it had been registered. But there was a discrepancy between the paperwork and the distress alert that had been received. The thirteenth digit on the registration documents was zero, but the thirteenth digit transmitted by the beacon was “C”.
SAR authorities around the world – including the US Coastguard – have repeatedly stressed that registration is not just a legal requirement, but that it saves lives. The flip side of this, of course, must be that unregistered epirbs cost lives. There’s no technical reason why the signal from an unregistered epirb should be delayed: the explanation usually given is that the position given by the first alert from an epirb is ambiguous, but that it can usually be resolved quite quickly if the vessel can be identified.
But the ambiguity, in this case, was resolved in just eight minutes. The burning question is what caused the fatal two-hour delay between the boat sinking and the first alert being received. Was it the tiny difference between “C” and “0”?
Photo of Lady Mary and her sisters in happier times, courtesy US Coast Guard