Get your position right...

[capnsensible]

Rame head is only noted as for instance as instantly recognisable by any Plymouth sailor and last I heard it was just past Penlee Point. One would rarely give position related to a ship of that name in harbour. I should have said Bloggs Harbour or Numpties Ledge so some folks did not strain at the gnat and swallow the camel.

I must stress that best practice would be to give lat and long plus local detail. Perhaps I am professionally used to greater rigour in safety protocol.

The whole point is that a simple latitude and longtitude can quickly be plotted anywhere by anyone and avoids the local knowledge trap. Ive just spent the week sailing along the Algarve and the vhf radio has been fairly constant in issuing pan pans and safety warnings plus ship calling in lat and long. So everyone can understand......

 

[capnsensible]

Typically if you want anyone to understand what strain at the gnat and swallow the camel actually mean......i have no idea...you will need to explain it. I hope you do better than that at work whatever that is......

 

[oldmanofthehills]

Typically if you want anyone to understand what strain at the gnat and swallow the camel actually mean......i have no idea...you will need to explain it. I hope you do better than that at work whatever that is......

Sorry its an old biblical proverb indicating getting stuck on trivia or irrelevance but failing to notice a disaster or abomination. I assumed everyone knew such proverbs if educated in the old days or could google them if up with the 21st century.

My industry suffers about a quarter of a person passenger deaths a year despite millions of passengers and only a very very few worker death and we still think that is way too many. My industry is a gold standard standard for safety because we continually strive to improve. Neither leisure or commercial boating is any where near that good and probably never will be.

I'm sorry if you dont like how I explain things when amusing myself when not working or sailing

 

[Humblebee]

Some interesting points above. Where I sail, off the west of Scotland, the only CG station I hear is Stornoway (occasionally Belfast but only faint). Anyway, it seem to me that getting off a quick mayday with the radio in the cockpit giving approximate location- range and bearing or just west of an island - would be helpful in alerting the CG and other neighbouring vessels. I would then follow this up once I had done what I could to deal with the incident by going below and passing Lat and Long from the DSC radionscreen.

 

[mjcoon]

Sorry its an old biblical proverb indicating getting stuck on trivia or irrelevance but failing to notice a disaster or abomination. I assumed everyone knew such proverbs if educated in the old days or could google them if up with the 21st century.

I recently started my fourth quarter-century, so I guess was educated in the "old days". But I don't think we spent any time on proverbs, biblical or otherwise! And I'm not curious enough to Google...

Mike.

 

[capnsensible]

Well scupper me starboard flip flop jack....

 

[capnsensible]

Where be you to?

Three parts of a best part of a tidy way out.

A real life fishermans conversation told to me by a real live fisherman.

 

[mm42]

Plus you may be speaking to a control centre that is hundreds of miles away from the incident location so they rely on Lat & Long to locate the casualty on their charting systems. "Three miles south-west of Beachy Head" will mean nothing to an operator in Aberdeen!

Also bear in mind there are far more commercial and government vessels around who may be well better equipped to offer assistance than local leisure sailors. These vessels and their bridge teams are unlikely to know all the local landmarks but can plot up a lat and long in no time.

 

[oldmanofthehills]

Also bear in mind there are far more commercial and government vessels around who may be well better equipped to offer assistance than local leisure sailors. These vessels and their bridge teams are unlikely to know all the local landmarks but can plot up a lat and long in no time.

No one is suggesting they abandon lat and long only that they can supplement it with local name to enable leisure yacht sailors to sitting at tiller to quickly understand if it in their area. They will knows its in general area as otherwise would not hear the broadcast but I cannot understand lat and long without writing it down then checking chart. (Aberdeen coast message will not reach me of Beachy Head so similar naming of head lands not actually an issue) If I know its near me I can call back CG and ask lat and long to be repeated. I and most of us are not on big ship with several on bridge to do all these tasks.

As for the victims, its much better to have DSC radio connected to chart plotter but many recreational fisherman and small commercial fisherman have not yet upgraded due to finance or whatever. So they must dictate their position while dealing with life threatening situation. Five miles south of Bloggs Head actually helps the CG if the the lat and long is misread in their distress or misheard by CG

 

[capnsensible]

Simply practice taking down and plotting gps positions. To gain competency at this takes minutes not hours.

 

[mjcoon]

The main problem with w3w is that you need a machine to encode and decode it.

It's also subject to the vagaries of spelling, so a language with tighter spelling rules like Spanish might work better than English.

There are a number of useful assertions in the Wikipedia article on W3W. Including that it is multi-lingual. Which may be more of a problem than solution in marine use. And that if a device has room for a 10Mb database it does not need to be on-line to operate.

Mike.

 

[lw395]

Simply practice taking down and plotting gps positions. To gain competency at this takes minutes not hours.

It's not hard, but when I hear something on the VHF, it's handy to have a coarse description of the location.
I'm not going to plot every position I hear on the VHF, as I'm very unlikely to be the nearest boat in the area covered by Solent Coastguard.
But if something is two miles off Christchurch and that's near where I am, I will know it's relevant to me.

W3W is completely unsuitable for this, you hear a position like 'banana gibbon suppository' and you have no idea whether it's 10 feet away or on the other side of the globe. And everytime you drift ten feet, the whole thing changes.
If you're in 2 knots of tide, that's 60 metres a minute? So three new words every 3 seconds.
Wholly inappropriate for this purpose.

 

[Juan Twothree]

you hear a position like 'banana gibbon suppository' and you have no idea whether it's 10 feet away or on the other side of the globe.

I was so hoping that banana gibbon suppository was an actual location on w3w.

But, rather disappointingly, it's not.

 

[scottie]

It's not hard, but when I hear something on the VHF, it's handy to have a coarse description of the location.
I'm not going to plot every position I hear on the VHF, as I'm very unlikely to be the nearest boat in the area covered by Solent Coastguard.
But if something is two miles off Christchurch and that's near where I am, I will know it's relevant to me.

W3W is completely unsuitable for this, you hear a position like 'banana gibbon suppository' and you have no idea whether it's 10 feet away or on the other side of the globe. And everytime you drift ten feet, the whole thing changes.
If you're in 2 knots of tide, that's 60 metres a minute? So three new words every 3 seconds.
Wholly inappropriate for this purpose.

But not if stuck on a rock perhaps! ��

 

[alex_m24]

Some interesting points above. Where I sail, off the west of Scotland, the only CG station I hear is Stornoway (occasionally Belfast but only faint). Anyway, it seem to me that getting off a quick mayday with the radio in the cockpit giving approximate location- range and bearing or just west of an island - would be helpful in alerting the CG and other neighbouring vessels. I would then follow this up once I had done what I could to deal with the incident by going below and passing Lat and Long from the DSC radionscreen.

As i was reading through this thread this is exactly what i was thinking. Fairly new to sailing and i have not mastered knowing off the top of my head how far away certain lat/long readings are from my current position i am constantly thinking that a rough area/landmark/location/island would be infinitely more useful than a specific lat/long. If you then know you are in the general vicinity the lat long can then be used to find bearings and distances.

 

[oldmanofthehills]

Simply practice taking down and plotting gps positions. To gain competency at this takes minutes not hours.

To argue that it could be done is to ignore the reality of short handed sailing where it can be hard to even hear announcements while attending to helm.

To resist an improvement in safety (such as supplementing lat and long with geographic description) simply because you personally dont need it, would win you no praise in a safety critical industry such as mine.

 

[Daydream believer]

Simply practice taking down and plotting gps positions. To gain competency at this takes minutes not hours.

Not at all easy, when at the helm & one has to go below,(it takes me some time to set the autopilot, re balance the sail, clamber over the traveler, unclip, climb down the steps, get to the chart table) get a pad & pencil & write down something that happened a couple of minutes ago.
How often do you hear- "we will transmit position in 2 minutes"- never!, & one can never be sure from conversation that it is coming. So what you suggest is not actually that easy, unless you are sitting at a chart table with pad & pencil waiting.
Then you have to get the chart & see if it is anywhere in your area.
A simple " range and bearing from a prominent point", is much easier & one does not have to move from the helm, so long as one can hear the VHF OK.
There is a lot to be said for giving both.

 

[capnsensible]

Jeez you guys cant half waffle. Who is saying any amplifying information shouldnt be given??

Of course it should
Just the same as in a distress call if you possibly can give yer mmsi call sign people on board nature of emergency type of vessel la la la.
But the fundamental bit is your lat and long. You guys seem to me to be putting up loadsa barriers and calling it too hard. Im saying it absolutely isnt and mebbe you need to practice more.

Last week I had a regular pan pan going on repeated every hour about a missing diver. Now because Ive got the rough position where I am in my head I knew it was a long way off. But I sent one of my crew to plot it for practice. On my own quick heave to and do it myself.

It was at the western end of the Staits of Gibraltar by the way. Im up at the Spanish end of the Algarve. So I wanna know lat long....

Oh yeah, how do you know if there is a pilot in the room?

He will soon tell you.....

Smiley!

 

[[163233]]

I was so hoping that banana gibbon suppository was an actual location on w3w.

But, rather disappointingly, it's not.

Boat.stuck.aground is though, ashore in Namibia..

They also seem to have included "mayday" in their word list:-
https://what3words.com/mayday.mayday.mayday

It was at the western end of the Staits of Gibraltar by the way. Im up at the Spanish end of the Algarve. So I wanna know lat long....

Yeah they seem to be banging on regularly round here. The other day they were trying to get a boat out of a firing range and while the lat was the same as us it was immediately obvious it was about 60 miles to the west. Lat and Long work quite well really.

I just wish people would breathe a bit while reading positions, there's a lot of digits a few gaps would help, and the Spanish especially seem to shout into the mic a bit.

 

[lumphammer]

The CG insist on lat and long positions. There are at least two reasons for this.
1. Simple lack of local knowledge.
2. Possible confusion due to multiple places having the same name.

Plus 3. the relative ease to enter a string of numbers into the relevant boxes on the computer rather than laying off range and bearing information.