SWIFTSURE COMMUNICATIONS 2010

I take care of marine operations and radio communications for the Swiftsure International Yacht Race and I’m interested in hearing from racers, past and present, on a possible change we might make to our communications protocols.

Under our current protocols, yachts on the offshore courses are required to report their position at various times during the race that are specified in the Sailing Instructions:  outbound, while rounding Swiftsure Bank, inbound and approaching the finish.  We also require reports of withdrawals and protests.  Yachts can report by cell phone or on marine VHF channel 26B.  (Cell phone coverage is notoriously unreliable on the Strait; those of you who tried it in 2009 will remember it as a bad year.)

Every year, some boats do not report in and, by Sunday afternoon, we start trying to call boats from whom we have not had regular position or mark-rounding reports.  Also, several times the Canadian Coast Guard has asked us to contact specific yachts.  Getting the attention of a yacht while racing presents a problem:  as all of you know, the Swiftsure Race presents more interesting and enjoyable things to do than monitoring radios and, since most yachts don’t have radios on deck, our calls to individual yachts are often not heard.  It’s unreasonable to expect racing yachts to monitor their VHF radios at all times but not being able to contact yachts and confirm their whereabouts is an expensive problem, at least for US and Canadian taxpayers:  we cannot stand down US and Canadian Coast Guard vessels and aircraft until we have accounted for all participating yachts.

So I’m looking for suggestions about how to contact yachts effectively while they are racing without requiring them to monitor radios continuously.  I have a couple ideas on which I would like some comment:

[1] tagging a race committee message to the end of each marine traffic broadcast (that’s the one on channel 9, at 15 minutes and 45 minutes after each hour, that reports the grid positions of commercial ships); and/or

[2] collecting the MMSI numbers from those boats that have DSC radios and have registered them.

Any comments on those ideas?   Any other ideas? 

Thanks very much.”

Cheers

Peter Mills

Marine Operations and Radio Communications Swiftsure Yacht Race VA7STO