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Displaying items by tag: Rear Admiral RE Day

The US Coast Guard has shown concern at the number of distress calls made from yachts that do not include GPS position information to aid rescuers in their location.
Already in the US, all newly installed VHF radios are required to have digital selective calling, which transmits distress calls to search and rescue services with the yacht's MMSI (Maritime Mobile Service Identity), a unique identifier for the yacht that includes its name, home port and owner's name. The new units are also connectable to onboard GPS systems.
But most yacht owners do not connect their radios to GPS, it's argued, and many have not registered their MMSI.
Sail World reports comments from US Coast Guard Rear Admiral RE Day, who said: "Of the roughly 100 digital selective calling distress alerts we are now receiving each month, about nine out of 10 do not have position information."
He added: "There's little the Coast Guard can do after receiving a distress alert with no position information, using an unregistered MMSI and having no follow-up voice communications."
Afloat.ie asks: Are yacht owners in Ireland more safety conscious than their US counterparts? Or do we need to take more care to provide the right info to search and rescue services? Have your say in the comments below or at the Afloat.ie forum!

The US Coast Guard has shown concern at the number of distress calls made from yachts that do not include GPS position information to aid rescuers in their location.

Already in the US, all newly installed VHF radios are required to have digital selective calling, which transmits distress calls to search and rescue services with the yacht's MMSI (Maritime Mobile Service Identity), a unique identifier for the yacht that includes its name, home port and owner's name. The new units are also connectable to onboard GPS systems.

But most yacht owners do not connect their radios to GPS, it's argued, and many have not registered their MMSI.

Sail World reports comments from US Coast Guard Rear Admiral RE Day, who said: "Of the roughly 100 digital selective calling distress alerts we are now receiving each month, about nine out of 10 do not have position information."

He added: "There's little the Coast Guard can do after receiving a distress alert with no position information, using an unregistered MMSI and having no follow-up voice communications."

Afloat.ie asks: Are yacht owners in Ireland more safety conscious than their US counterparts? Or do we need to take more care to provide the right info to search and rescue services? Have your say in the comments below or at the Afloat.ie forum!

Published in Water Safety

Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC) is one of Europe's biggest yacht racing clubs. It has almost sixteen hundred elected members. It presents more than 100 perpetual trophies each season some dating back to 1884. It provides weekly racing for upwards of 360 yachts, ranging from ocean-going forty footers to small dinghies for juniors.

Undaunted by austerity and encircling gloom, Dublin Bay Sailing Club (DBSC), supported by an institutional memory of one hundred and twenty-nine years of racing and having survived two world wars, a civil war and not to mention the nineteen-thirties depression, it continues to present its racing programme year after year as a cherished Dublin sporting institution.

The DBSC formula that, over the years, has worked very well for Dun Laoghaire sailors. As ever DBSC start racing at the end of April and finish at the end of September. The current commodore is Eddie Totterdell of the National Yacht Club.

The character of racing remains broadly the same in recent times, with starts and finishes at Club's two committee boats, one of them DBSC's new flagship, the Freebird. The latter will also service dinghy racing on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Having more in the way of creature comfort than the John T. Biggs, it has enabled the dinghy sub-committee to attract a regular team to manage its races, very much as happened in the case of MacLir and more recently with the Spirit of the Irish. The expectation is that this will raise the quality of dinghy race management, which, operating as it did on a class quota system, had tended to suffer from a lack of continuity.