Grab Bag contents: three questions

bbg said:
It really depends what your intended cruising range is. If you are cruising coastally (and I include cross-channel or to Ireland, for example) your needs are going to be different than if you do Plymouth to La Coruna. If you are cruising coastally, all you really need is a PLB (which will probably be on one of you anyway - I keep mine on me at all times) and a HH radio would be nice.
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Many thanks for the info, very useful: just to clarify the shipping guy I spoke to reckons that the SARTs ships (I'm not sure over what size) are mandated to carry, must not only transmit on 406, but must also have the capability to act as a 9GHz X-Band radar transponder. As you say a GPIRB (EPIRB or PLB) should have already transmitted one's coordinates, so to be honest I'm nor quite sure what the regs are getting at here. A great sail in many ways.

Incidentally you mention Plymouth to La Coruna, which I've never done. But being Irish I have sailed Kinsale to La Coruna, which of the wind is right, is a bite-sized trip into the deep ocean of almost exactly 500 miles; so with a fair wind about three days at sea and unlikely to be more than three nights. One is never more than about 200 miles from land, which on a good day is just within the range of the SAR helos; even better it's well inside the 5 day horizon that European weather forecasts are reliable to in settled summer conditions.

Edit: just spotted on another threat that you approached Brazil from a few hundred miles off in a Mini; so I'm guessing you were racing from Douarnenez to Pointe-a-Pitre: mad, fab, awesome :encouragement:
 
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Lots of things people are listing in their Grab bag I think belong in the raft. Water, Flares (if you must!), mirror, ?torch, light sticks etc.

To me the things that belong in the grab bag are:

* Short Shelf Life (i.e. less than the life of raft service date)
* Items that change regularly - like paperwork/documents
* Items that you also need access to when the raft is not deployed (and which carrying duplicates of is not feasible due to size or cost). So probably the HH VHF, but not the mirror - you can have a mirror on board and a mirror in the raft for the cost. Or better still find kit that has a mirror inbuilt in a surface.
 
dom said:
Many thanks for the info, very useful: just to clarify the shipping guy I spoke to reckons that the SARTs ships (I'm not sure over what size) are mandated to carry, must not only transmit on 406, but must also have the capability to act as a 9GHz X-Band radar transponder. As you say a GPIRB (EPIRB or PLB) should have already transmitted one's coordinates, so to be honest I'm nor quite sure what the regs are getting at here. A great sail in many ways.
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EPIRB or PLB co-ords have a lag time and are dependant on transmission of data which is sometimes inteerupted by not being held steady in a distress situation. So two things happen:
- All EPIRBS (GPS or not) send a distress message on 406 that identifies its self. That is picked up by two types of satellite. The first - a GeoStationary can identify a VERY large search area. For us thats Europe/North West Atlantic ;-) The second is mobile. once to of those pass you can get the position to about 5km x 5km. Not bad! But if its looking for a head in the water not good enough if its my head!! So your GPS version (almost all modern ones are GPS) sends the GPS co-ords. It only activates the GPS when you activate it so it needs a fix. If you ever try and activate any GPS while on the move and its not been on for a while it can take a while to get a decent fix. Once it has that fix you are sorted it should send that to the GeoStationary Sat. Job done. Except it then takes 90 minutes for the helo to be overhead. So they fly to the last received position up date. The helo can't access that direct so has to be passed it by the local CG, who get it from Falmouth who get it from Spain who receive it at predetermined intervals from the PLB/EPIRB. local CG will map drift rates - BUT they don't know what is drifting. A person (LJ on or not), a raft, a dinghy, a whole boat...

- So the second thing is that the device will transmit a ping on 121.5 which aircraft etc can detect -that means you can find it even if the GPS isn't getting through.

I don't think I've ever seen a pleasure vessel that had a radar transponder in addition to one of those bits of kit.
 
dom said:
Many thanks for the info, very useful: just to clarify the shipping guy I spoke to reckons that the SARTs ships (I'm not sure over what size) are mandated to carry, must not only transmit on 406, but must also have the capability to act as a 9GHz X-Band radar transponder. As you say a GPIRB (EPIRB or PLB) should have already transmitted one's coordinates, so to be honest I'm nor quite sure what the regs are getting at here.
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SARTs are radar transponders, they show up as a line of dots on a ship's radar which they can home in on (until they get very close, when the signals get into the receiver even when it's not facing them and the dots become arcs and then complete rings). They don't transmit on 406MHz.

EPIRBs we're all familiar with of course. They transmit on 406 and 121.5, but not radar.

SARTs are fairly simple devices, so I believe they've been around for a long time and would predate EPIRBs. Shipping safety regs tend to add things, but are more reluctant to remove or replace. So I don't think the requirement for both SARTs and EPIRB is a carefully thought-out combination, it's just that SARTs in lifeboats and rafts were required first, and then a requirement for an EPIRB added later.

That said, on Stavros we had several SARTs but only one EPIRB. The abandon-ship drill involved a SART going into each raft except one, which got the EPIRB instead. So the EPIRB would raise the alarm, and then when rescuers were in the area they'd be able to find the other rafts by radar, which makes a certain kind of sense.

Pete
 
ShinyShoe said:
Lots of things people are listing in their Grab bag I think belong in the raft.
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That's good in theory, but with a typical vacuum-packed leisure raft you don't get a choice. No chance of adding anything for the first three years, and then if you change your mind about anything it's three years after that. And there's very little room for extra bits and bobs because we all want the smallest possible packed size.

Pete
 
prv said:
I have a colour copy of my passport, debit card, and driving license (hire car?) run through an ordinary office laminator and placed at the bottom of the bag taking up no space. Obviously you don't need them to survive, but they might just save a little inconvenience after being landed in France for example. No need for ship's papers in the bag; the non-reproducible ones are saved as scans on my computer at home.
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Interesting

I use a

http://www.amazon.co.uk/U-Tag-digit...=1448990126&sr=8-1&keywords=medical+alert+usb

and have all my documents on a USB dog tag. I've not tested it for salt water ingress, but it is worn round my neck. Papers are also on my Dropbox account.
 
Just for reference, you can't just call it a SART anymore as both radar SARTS and AIS SARTS have been available and acceptable under IMO SOLAS and GMDSS regulations for some years now.
 
In my grab bag this Summer, for a short solo trip between Wales and South of Ireland, I packed a handheld VHF, a PLB and an Odeo LED flare. Also tightly packed change of inner thermals, spare thermal cap and a few energy bars. If I had to survive for more than a day, I would have been surprised !
 
dom said:
Edit: just spotted on another threat that you approached Brazil from a few hundred miles off in a Mini; so I'm guessing you were racing from Douarnenez to Pointe-a-Pitre
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La Rochelle to Salvador de Bahia - it was 4 years ago. Seeing Brazil on the last morning - first land I'd seen in over three weeks - was special.
 
Camelia said:
Interesting

I use a

http://www.amazon.co.uk/U-Tag-digit...=1448990126&sr=8-1&keywords=medical+alert+usb

and have all my documents on a USB dog tag. I've not tested it for salt water ingress, but it is worn round my neck. Papers are also on my Dropbox account.
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Unfortunately it doesn't say that it's waterproof!
Laminated scans and CD's are, also a CD can be used as a signal mirror ;)
Re copies of docs, although they might make officials look on you more sympathetically, I think that their only real use is that you have a record of the document number to help get a replacement.
 
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