How To Avoid The Scammers

And not get separated from your hard earned dollars. If you have ever bought or sold anything over the Internet, whether it was equipment, parts, electronics or even a boat, chances are you have been contacted by scammers. If you haven’t, I can promise you that you will be. Our recent experience in selling some boat equipment online is a typical ploy used quite often to try and con someone out of their money or personal information, and we want to share that experience and offer some tips on how to avoid being scammed yourself by these lowlifes. We always ask that our followers share our blogs if they find them useful, and in this case, we encourage you to share this post with everyone and anyone you care about so that they can avoid the heartache and financial loss if they are taken in by these criminals. The following information and tips may just help others avoid making mistakes, so please read on.

Boating Safety Tips For Everyone

Always review basic safety rules with your passengers before departure.


BE WEATHER-WISE
❐ Check local weather conditions before departure
• Play it safe and get off the water if you notice darkening clouds, rough, changing winds or sudden temperature drops

 
FOLLOW A PRE-DEPARTURE CHECKLIST
❐ Boating safety rules
❐ Proper equipment
• Ensure you'll be ready for any on-water emergency


USE COMMON SENSE
❐ Operate at a safe speed, especially on crowded waters
❐ Be alert
❐ Steer clear of large vessels
❐ Pay attention to buoys and other navigational aids


DESIGNATE AN ASSISTANT SKIPPER
❐ Ensure another person on board can take the helm and return to shore should you become incapacitated


DEVELOP A FLOAT PLAN
❐ Always let someone on shore know your boating plans.
Include:
• Name, address, and phone number of trip leader and passengers
• Boat type and registration
• Trip itinerary
• Type of communication and signal equipment on board


LEARN TO SWIM 
❐ Check with local pools, or organizations such as the YMCA and American Red Cross for lessons


WEAR LIFEJACKETS
❐ Fit and assign a lifejacket to each passenger prior to launch


TAKE A BOATING COURSE
• Boating education requirements vary by state; regardless of your state's regulations, it's smart to be educated


SCHEDULE A FREE VESSEL SAFETY CHECK
• The U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Power Squadrons offer free vessel safety checks to verify presence and condition of safety equipment, check out your boat and make safety recommendations. Find an examiner: http://www.safetyseal.net/GetVSC/


SAFETY RESOURCES
• Boat-ed.com: Official boating safety courses and online tests for your boat license
• US Power Squadrons (usps.org) and Coast Guard Auxiliaries (cgaux.org): Free vessel safety checks, boater education and safe boating tips
• Boater101.com: Water and boating safety instruction
Content courtesy of BoatSafe.com

Special Notice

The Coast Guard has recently released its first boating safety App. Features of the app include: state boating information; a safety equipment checklist; free boating safety check requests; navigation rules; float plans; and calling features to report pollution or suspicious activity. When location services are enabled, users can receive the latest weather reports from the closest National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration weather buoys as well as report the location of a hazard on the water. The app also features an Emergency Assistance button which, with locations services enabled, will call the closest Coast Guard command center. http://www.uscg.mil/mobile/

Safety First

I know that phrase has been seriously over used. But it's the first thing that comes to mind when we're planning a project or preparing for a cruise. Sure there are the usual safety equipment requirements for your boat, but there are many other pieces of safety equipment that for us are cruise specific, depending on when and where we plan to travel. We have an entire category for safety on this blog. That's how serious we are about the issue. In preparing Beach House for our upcoming cruise to the Bahamas and the Great Loop, we had different safety considerations than our recent trips along the Atlantic ICW. Being in close contact to land and having had good VHF and cell phone coverage, our communications equipment was satisfactory at the time. Crossing the Gulf Stream, traveling alone across the Bahamas Banks, anchoring in remote areas or crossing the Gulf of Mexico will mean we need to be able to provide for ourselves without outside help for a period of time. It also means we will need to be able to communicate long range in an emergency.

Plotting Your Course

In September of 1987, I sailed my 30-foot Hughes Columbia sailboat south to Little River, South Carolina. After a few days of waiting weather, I exited the Little River Inlet and pointed the bow towards Bermuda, some 1,000 miles away. To find that small speck in the middle of the Atlantic, I had the most up-to-date navigational instruments of the time. They consisted of a compass, VHF radio, a sextant with complete tables, paper charts and a radio direction finder. Seven and a half days later, I tuned the RDF to the radio signal for St. Georges Harbor and my feelings of accomplishment were beyond explanation.

Hurricane Preparations For The 2010 Season

Have you ever had the experience of sitting out a hurricane on your boat? Have you had to leave your boat and wait out a storm, wondering if it would survive? We have done both and neither are experiences we want to go through again. Sitting on board, listening to the wind howling in the rigging and climbing on deck during pelting rain just to adjust dock lines and anchor rode is not our idea of cruising fun, and the anxiety factor is off the charts. Sitting in a hotel room hundreds of miles away, not knowing if the boat made it through or if your next contact is the insurance company. June is just the beginning of the hurricane season, but it is also a good time to get yourself and your boat prepared. With our former boat Sea Trek, we have been through fifteen named storms, twelve of them hurricanes. So we do have some first hand knowledge for preparing and we thought this a good time to share our experiences.

DSC Radio safety Alert

With the proliferation and popularity of DSC radios, we felt you needed to be advised of this important potential safety issue. The following is a Safety Alert issued by the U.S. Coast Guard:

Dangers Associated with Automatic Channel Switching on Digital Selective Calling (DSC) Equipped VHF Marine Radios. It has come to the Coast Guard's attention that an automatic channel switching feature found on certain models of Digital Selective Calling (DSC) equipped VHF marine radios may create an unintended hazard by automatically switching from a working channel that might be in use at the time to Channel 16 when the VHF marine radio receives a DSC distress alert, distress alert acknowledgment or other DSC call where a VHF channel number has been designated.

 This could happen without a vessel/radio operator's immediate knowledge and could initiate an unsafe condition by which the vessel/radio operators would believe they were communicating on a working channel such as Channel 13 when, in fact, they were actually on Channel 16. Imagine a towboat operator on the lower Mississippi River making passing agreements on VHF channel 67 and then suddenly, without warning, not being able to quickly reestablish communications with those vessels because his/her radio automatically switched to Channel 16 instead. Since this unsafe condition can happen at any time, the Coast Guard strongly recommends disabling the automatic channel switching feature when maintaining a listening watch or communicating on the designated bridge-to-bridge radiotelephone, or while monitoring the vessel traffic services (VTS) channel. Radios that lack the disabling feature should not be used for bridge-to-bridge or VTS communications.

The International Telecommunications Union Sector for Radiocommunications, Recommendation M.493-11 published in 2004 and later versions require DSC-equipped radios to provide for disabling of this channel auto-switch feature. In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) requires all DSC-equipped radios certified after March 25, 2009 to meet this requirement. Manufacturers that do not provide a disable function are encouraged to do so and to inform their customers if means for correction exist. Updated information including a listing of manufacturers of radios believed to be affected by this Safety Alert will be posted as available at http://www.navcen.uscg.gov/marcomms/gmdss/dsc.htm .

The Coast Guard strongly reminds radio operators and other users to always ensure they are on the proper operating channel when communicating or maintaining watch, particularly with DSC-equipped radios capable of channel auto-switching.
 
This safety alert is provided for informational purposes only and does not relieve any domestic or international safety, operational or material requirement.
Developed by the Spectrum Management and Telecommunications Policy Division (CG-652),
United States Coast Guard Headquarters, Washington, DC. Questions should be directed to Mr. Russell Levin at (202) 475 3555 or Russell.S.Levin@uscg.mil

You activated your EPIRB... now what?

You activated your EPIRB... now what?

Posted by Ryan Erickson |

Have you ever wondered exactly how one actually gets rescued after they pull the trigger on their
406mhz Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons (EPIRB)? Or what about if you happen to be that unlucky soul who didn't register their EPIRB? Well I thought I would run down the quick and dirty of what happens when the Search and Rescue system is activated by the use of an EPIRB and a little hypotheticalness. Before I do this though I'll let you know that I am not an expert in the ways of being a SAR Controller, I am what's considered a junior as I have just under a year of real experience. That being said, I been down the road plenty of times to discuss how it works and I invite all of you Salty SAR Dawgs out there to fill in the gaps or leave your comments.

Fire Extinguisher Recall

We just came across this recall notice for some Kidde Fire Extinguishers. Please click on the link and check to be sure you do not have one on board

http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml09/09151.html