How long to spot an MOB & how good is your lookout?

[wooslehunter]

I was recently involved in an excercise. We put an MOB dummy in the water and then recoved it around 90 minutes later. Our task was to "guard" the MOB so no-one called it in as a real MOB but we stood off quite a way most of the time so as not to influence things. The object of the excercise was not to see how long it would take to be spotted but it's interesting to see what happened.

It was clad in a red over-suit and a partially inflated yellow life-jacket. the weather was calm and bright. The dummy was dropped at the western edge of southampton water in the morning and drifted east with the tide. We were in a RIB and the dummy was visible as "something in the water" at over 0.5nm. Only slightly closer, we could easily see the colour of the lifejacket.

Ferries were warned so they don't come into the equation

Activity in that area was quite high with several yacht racing fleets around and towards the end of the excercise lots of cruisers were comming out of the southampton water.

During the excercise ONLY ONE power boat made any obvious about turn to investigate. Several yachts passed quite close and one even passed it twice. We thought they'd seen at and were comming to investigate but no. It even passed about 25m from an anchored fishing boat. When we approached them to make sure they didn't call anything in to coastguard they were very suprised and didn't even know it was there. Quite a few boats passed close enough to see enough to identify the "yellow clad blob" - obvious enough to warrant investigation.

Draw you own conclusions.......

 

[Guest]

People don\'t want to be involved ... and ...

they go about blinkered ....

No-one wants to get involved nowadays ...

As to visibility of objects in water etc. - having been involved in MOB in real life ... they are visible for very short time indeed ... even the life-buoy over as a marker is lost very quickly ....

 

[marilynch]

Re: People don\'t want to be involved ... and ...

People all too often dont want to believe their eyes and yes dont want to get involved and too lazy to change course to investigate and even worse (if it could be) assume someone else or the vessel they have fallen off may be helping/activating MOB proceedure already but this definately is not always the case.

I don't think all mariners should necessarily rush to investigate everything that does not 'look right' in or on the water that would be daft but a simple radio safety transmission to CG.... This may be nothing but at position blah blah e.t.c. e.t.c...

And now to see the good in folks ...
Perhaps next time the MOB Dummy could be babysat with an unmarked RIB and not a rescue boat? the response may be different.

 

[AliM]

A couple of years ago I spotted what looked like a body in the water in the Orwell. We went over to investigate, pulses racing, but were overtaken by a RIB with about 6 trainees, who were doing their MOB drill. In the 30 seconds when we thought it was a genuine emergency, we'd worked out exactly how we'd handle it, so it was almost disappointing when we discovered we were not needed!

Last year, we were sailing in the IJsselmeer, when we spotted a yacht with a broken mast. We motored over to offer help, but as we approached, the couple on board said they were fine and didn't need help. They were just sitting there, and the conditions were quite calm, so we took them at their word and sailed away. We saw dozens of yachts approach them and each was turned away like us. After a good hour I heard someone on the VHF alert the rescue services. We were a long way away by that time, so we never discovered whether someone came to tow them in, or why they had rejected so many offers of help.

 

[Sans Bateau]

Returning to the Solent from our Hols in the summer we saw a 'MOB' halfway across the channel!

Conditions were, to say the least, calm. There was no waving of arms, so we feared the worst, this is going to be tough we thought!

We came alongside and quickly got our MOB on board.

Anyone lost a kids lilo with a sea horse head? /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif

We were very very relieved. But it did demonstrate to us that we were watching and could get alongside a victim. Just hope others would be just as vigilant if it were one of us.