Kevrumbo
Banned
- Messages
- 5,659
- Reaction score
- 1,366
- # of dives
- 1000 - 2499
Again @PygmySeahorse , even a delay of 9 hours worst case as above in the OP can be survivable -especially in tropical 80°F/27°C waters. (The WWII survivors of the torpedoed USS Indianapolis just barely endured four days at sea without any acknowledged report they were overdue or Naval Command's awareness of the sinking, before being luckily spotted by a routine air patrol and later rescued. . .)There are a number of Indonesian resorts where you need to go to a specific part of the island to get phone signal, which can be kilometres away from the dock and the resort itself, and some small, remote islands have no phone signal at all: I've dived from one (you take all the food and drink you'll need and they open the resort for you).
However, let's assume this resort/op does have phone coverage, by the time a boat has returned to dock, refuelled, loaded up with more fuel and headed out again (let's also assume the resort/operator/island has ample fuel reserves), you're still looking at guys using often inaccurate paper charts that they may not be very good at reading to aim for a latitude and longitude reading that will be at least an hour out of date by the time they get to the general search area. . .
●The less info SAR units have about your location, the larger the Search Area.
●The larger the Search Area, the longer the search until you are located.
Do whatever else you can to pack in your kit with the idea of giving more margin for survival and discovery in a delayed SAR sortie (signal mirror; primary led light; whistle/dive alert horn; sealed water source etc).
Dan you may want to read @IyaDiver's post #181 in the 7 divers lost off Bali thread, regarding SEA boats which don't have their own radios. Not instead of your list - in addition to.
Nautilus Lifeline
VHF beacons like the Nautilus Lifeline, and portable mobile VHF handhelds have a very limited & variable range, usually to the horizon 5km at best in high ocean swells and rain conditions, to 20km in clear calm conditions and a 30m tall receiving land based antenna at the other end.. . .Those have a high failure rate, and if they do work - they only reach as far as you can see, much less than claimed. Some people like to talk to their boats, if the boats have a radio turned on loud enough.
So if you surface from a dive and your skiff is nowhere to be seen line-of-sight to the horizon for VHF radio communications in any direction, then you better have a PLB direct to satellite as back-up.
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