Environment
Caught with your comms down Constant watch: Monitors and search and rescue officers in the Australian Rescue Centre. Images supplied by AMSA.
Navigating the ocean can be challenging at the best of times, let alone at night in a small broken-down vessel with no way of communicating with anyone. This is exactly what happened near Edward River on Cape York, Queensland. By Daniel Redondo and Kim Daniels On 4 April 2018, a 14-foot fishing dory with one person on board set out from its mothership in the early afternoon to travel four nautical miles for an afternoon of fishing before returning to the mothership before last light.
unknown, so AMSA started drift planning from the mouth of the Edward River where the dory was headed.
mothership could have easily located the dory and rescued the people on board more quickly.
The search area initially covered 181 nautical miles, but due to the wind and current this rapidly expanded to 240 nautical miles over a 24-hour period.
But the vessel and crew didn’t return, and with no way of knowing what had happened, the mothership had no option but to report the overdue dory to Thursday Island Water Police, who then contacted AMSA for assistance.
The Weipa Volunteer Marine Rescue and the AMSA Cairns Challenger jet were tasked to assist in the search.
Unfortunately a lack of communication between dories and motherships— and inadequate safety equipment on board—is a frequent occurrence. This puts lives at risk and often leads to large-scale search and rescue operations when dories fail to return— usually after last light.
Many search and rescue operations are carried out jointly by commonwealth, state and territory authorities. This incident was no different and AMSA commenced search operations as soon as local police requested assistance.
Two hours after commencing its search, the Challenger jet advised AMSA that they had located the dory and tasked a nearby fishing vessel to collect the person on board who was thankfully in good health. The dory had lost engine power and drifted 18 nautical miles off shore, approximately 18 nautical miles from the mothership.
The missing dory had no communication equipment or EPIRB, and the position of the dory was
Had the dory been equipped with two-way communication equipment, such as VHF radio or HF radio, the
31
Working Boats July 2019
Last year AMSA responded to sixteen dory-related incidents. In every case, the dories involved did not have a way of communicating with the mothership or anyone else. Thankfully all the individuals involved in these incidents were safely rescued, but the fact remains that if they had adequate communication, lifesaving and distress-alerting equipment, a search and rescue operation may not have been required at all.
