On Mon, 8 Feb 2010 17:18:28 +0000, Ian Jackson
wrote:
>>It took me about 5 minutes using a ham radio set on a small yacht 700
>>miles offshore to be speaking with an appropriate person in the US
>>coastguard. (In that case nothing worse than a very large buoy that
>>was adrift and a danger to shipping. The buoy was recovered within 36
>>hours.)
>Presumably you initially made contact with some radio amateur
>(somewhere), and he then set the wheels in motion by phoning the US
>coastguard etc. It obviously wasn't certain 'GLK London'!
>http://www.southgatearc.org/news/june2007/hancock.htm
LOL - yes I recall that episode from my childhood when the series of
"Hancock's half-hour" was originally aired!
The ham I contacted was able to use his "phone patch" equipment to
allow me to speak to the coast guard directly via his landline. Apart
from the danger to navigation, the buoy in question was a research
buoy that had broken free of its mooring and was worth many hundreds
of thousands of dollars, and so they were very pleased to find it. We
happened to come across the ship that recovered it on its way back to
port (in fact they deliberately diverted slightly to say, "Thanks" to
us), and I had a long radio conversation with them. Apparently the
storm that had caused the buoy to be set adrift a month or so
previously had also damaged its satellite aerial so they had not been
able to track it, but they stated that its internal recorders had not
been affected and the buoy had gathered data that might prove more
valuable than the data it would have gathered had it remained where it
was supposed to be.
It was a steel cylindrical buoy about 10 meters in diameter (that's
*huge*) and rose around 3 meters from the water to its deck, with a
(damaged) tower and aerial array above that. Fortunately we had come
across it just after sunrise, because it was unlit and a collision
would have caused us some very severe damage.
--
Cynic
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