January 2009
Boating, in general, is such a safe activity that any attempt to break the statistics down beyond “about twenty people die in boating accidents around the UK each year” is a pretty pointless activity. The numbers aren’t big enough to produce any useful information, and small enough to be easily distorted by a single incident. But there can be little doubt that one of the most successful ways of killing yourself with a boat is to fall off it.
This is probably why motor boating has a generally better safety record than sailing or canoeing: motor boats don’t go around at leaning over, you tend to sit in them rather than on them, and you tend to stay sitting, rather than go clambering around on wet fibreglass.
It is almost certainly why – as the market for plotters, and radios heads towards saturation point – the marine electronics industry is getting more and more interested in man overboard systems.
At the boat show this year, I came across three which were new to me.
The budget option came from Nasa Marine, whose MoBi (Man over board indicator) consists of a base station and three “fobs” for £199, with the option of adding up to another five fobs for other crew members, pets, or children. The base station – in a box that bears an uncanny resemblance to Nasa’s Navtex receiver – regularly transmits to each of the fobs in turn. The fob – a fairly bulky bit of kit that is bigger and heavier than most mobile phones – is supposed to reply. If it doesn’t, then the base unit sounds an alarm and highlights the identity of the missing fob.
Next
up came
Deckband, which makes the rather contradictory claim that it is “a
revolutionary new concept in marine communication and safety” and that
it is “based
on widely established Bluetooth®
technology”. Essentially the idea is that each crew member wears an
“Iqua Smart
Badge” headset (rather like a thick identity card, worn on a strap
round the
neck, and with an earpiece in one ear) that gives them a constant
two-way audio
link with the base station mounted somewhere on board. So they can
communicate
with each other without having to shout, or even – if they share each
other’s
taste – listen to the same radio or CD without inflicting it on every
other
boat that’s within earshot. The safety element comes in because when someone falls overboard, the Bluetooth connection between the base station and their Smart Badge will fail, prompting the base unit to sound an alarm.
Prices start at £595 for the base unit and four rechargeable “Smart Badges”.
Top price of
the three, and radically different from the other two is the Kannad
Wavefinder.
Instead of sounding the alarm when the personal transmitter and the
base
station lose touch with each other, it uses miniature distress beacons
which
transmit only when they have been activated by being removed from their
belt
holster or from inside a folded lifejacket. The obvious drawback of this system is that it isn’t fully automatic: it relies on the assumption that the casualty will be wearing a lifejacket that has already been fitted with a beacon, or that he will remove the beacon from his belt when he is in the water. The big advantage of the system is that once the beacon has been activated, it transmits continuously, which means that the automatic direction finder in the on-board unit can guide the boat back to the casualty. Surprisingly – and unlike systems such as ACR’s Vecta and Seamarshal –it operates at 869.5MHz, in the licence-free part of the spectrum that is used by gadgets such as supermarket security tags, but not by lifeboats or coastguard helicopters.
www.nasamarine.com
www.deckband.co.uk
www.mantsbrite.com; www.kannad.com
