Worse things happen at sea

It’s this time of year when the Atlantic Ocean gets littered with boats, a result of rescues needed for unprepared mariners. The latest was when a 40+ foot Hunter sailboat was overdue en route from New Jersey to Bermuda, and the family of the singlehander contacted the Coast Guard for help.

With a search area the size nearly twice the size of Texas in unforgiving seas, luck played a role in finding the disabled yacht 270 miles off North Carolina. Anne and Stuart Letton happened to be nearby in their Outremer 51 Time Bandit, as Stuart explains:

You’ve probably heard the high-speed gibberish that radio and TV advertisers put at the end of their commercials to caution those able to understand it, that their once-in-a-lifetime offer or new wonder drug maybe isn’t exactly that great. This garbled, high-speed message presumably absolves them of all responsibilities should something, readily foreseeable to them, but not to you, happen.

Well, I’ve this theory that the US Coast Guard send their radio operators on the course where these advertising folk learn to speak ultra-fast. And unintelligibly. Over this last summer we’ve all but tuned out the US coastguard VHF announcements as, to us and many people we’ve spoken to, their messages are, as I say, unintelligible. – Full report