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A Fishing Boat off a Rocky Coast in a Storm with a Wreck, oil on canvas painted by Jacob Adriaensz Bellevois in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich. Prints available via 020 8312 6516 quoting Repro ID BHC0837, or log on to www.nmm.ac.uk
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Maybe you caught that horrific revisit of the 1979 Fastnet Race on the Beeb the other night, Surviving Disaster. Maybe you didn't. So you may not remember the same thing happening in the Sydney-Hobart in 1998. Disaster, I mean. Calamitous, everything-go-wrong-at-once, you're-going-to-die disaster. Which, if you remember, is something that can happen every time you put to sea. One bad hiccup, whoops, and you're staring at the end of the world.
Plan for disaster
So I'm sitting here, surrounded by brochures and catalogues that are all reassuring me I can plan for disaster. I've got protective gear, life jackets, life rafts, medical kits and all kinds of emergency stuff. And I'm looking at the latest goodie that shows me where I'm going so I can keep out of trouble - the complete revolution that has so taken over our favourite pastime that I feel like an idiot without one. By which of course I mean the GPS/chartplotter, the thing you should never leave harbour without.
Know your position
OK, but disasters are sudden. They are also completely unexpected. And if there's any one thing we should remember about pretty well any disaster at sea, it's WHERE ARE YOU? In both the racing disasters I've already referred to, things got worse because nobody knew their position accurately. Not surprising when you're overwhelmed by a storm and severely challenged to get anything right. Which kind of makes it worse when there's a chopper up there searching, and it's sixty miles off target.
Are you ready for emergency?
I have no idea how I would react in an emergency. Would I be cool, calm and collected, or would my mind cause me to be a complete dork? So I'm eyeing these brochures, particularly for the GPS, and brooding on disasters. I have a family to think of, I'd be stupid not to. And the one thing it occurs to me I would want to see alongside every one of these glitzy colour screens, is an MOB button. I might be slow on the uptake, but even if I'm in a complete tizz, I think I could rely on myself to hit a panic button in an emergency. Because at least when things started to go wrong, I would know where I was.
You see, disasters don't necessarily all happen sat once. There's usually a chain of one thing after another, until the unthinkable is inevitable. At least with an MOB button, I could train myself to lock in an accurate GPS fix of where I was before I got involved with who was injured, boat damage and what to do next. A lot happens as things go from bad to worse, including losing complete track of normal disciplines. I don't want to be like that poor ferry al-Salam Boccaccio '98 which went down in the Red Sea. That disaster took most of her voyage to happen - and it was only after she sank that an automatic beacon floated free of the ship and alerted a monitoring base in Scotland that a rescue started to happen, six hours later.
Gear to get you rescued
And it's not just the MOB button I want either. Let's have an EPIRB (Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon) or at least a SART (Search and Rescue Transponder) as well. If I've got my hands full with an emergency, I can't go faffing around trying to work out where the heck I am when there's people who might be hurting who need me. Yes, I could mess with the radio, if I'm not too panicky to follow VHF procedure - and if the electrics aren't down because whatever triggered this, like lots of water in the wrong place, hasn't taken out the batteries.
Getting training
Better than that, I'm dragging me and my crew down to my nearest RYA centre and signing everybody up for two courses, no questions asked. First, the Basic Survival Course, which covers preparation for survival, lifejackets, medical issues, search and rescue procedures, then climbing in a swimming pool with a liferaft so we can practice coming unstuck getting into an inflated but uncooperative one in full gear.
Second, the ISAF Offshore Safety Course, which sets us all up for rough weather and problems at sea - I mean let's face it, round our coasts when will you NOT run into the odd spot of rough stuff? Which means we're into one day of sea survival training, a half-day first aid course, and another half-day training in seamanship and emergencies.
Getting more training
Oh, yeah. And then I'm going to check out the Marine & Coastguard Agency to see what they can offer too, at www.mcga.gov.uk - plus I'm going to check www.mcaorals.co.uk as well, because they also run courses. Serious? Over-reacting? Let me put it to you this way. I'm think of these courses as a licence not to get drowned.
How ready are you?
OK, so I've pressed the panic button. And I haven't even left my armchair. But I've got a pretty good idea of what to do, and none of us are going out there until we're ready. How about you?
