GregSaiz
Contributor
I had an opportunity to use my Lifeline in a non-emergency incident during a recent live aboard trip in the Philippines. We were diving in groups from a chase boat and our group was in a ripping current. We surfaced to find the swells were picking up and the chase boat was not on our position. We were still in visual range of the main vessel, however, they could not hear our surface whistles and seeing our SMB would be difficult. Earlier, I found the Lifeline could not be tuned to the preferred ship-to-ship channel utilized by the boat crew, channel 3A. Although it was not yet an emergency situation, everyone in our group was getting a bit nervous as we were going the wrong direction in rough seas. Since we were in a very remote location, I decided to hail the boat on the distress channel 16. The radio seemed to perform as expected but no response was received. We later found the ships handheld radios were locked to channel 3A so they would not auto-switch to distress traffic on channel 16. A couple of observations and lessons learned:
1) I'm not sure why the Lifeline does not allow a user to tune chat to channel 3A. It may be a restricted channel in the US but so are many of the other channels users are allowed to manually select. It was apparently okay to use 3A in our location for ship-to-ship communication.
2) You should triple check with your boat that all radios onboard are setup to monitor channel 16. I didn't have an opportunity to speak with the captain about this but will certainly follow up.
Bottom line, the chase boat saw our SMB and we were picked up. I can only assume if we were swept out to sea, someone would have tuned to channel 16 as they conducted a search.
1) I'm not sure why the Lifeline does not allow a user to tune chat to channel 3A. It may be a restricted channel in the US but so are many of the other channels users are allowed to manually select. It was apparently okay to use 3A in our location for ship-to-ship communication.
2) You should triple check with your boat that all radios onboard are setup to monitor channel 16. I didn't have an opportunity to speak with the captain about this but will certainly follow up.
Bottom line, the chase boat saw our SMB and we were picked up. I can only assume if we were swept out to sea, someone would have tuned to channel 16 as they conducted a search.