Crew Overboard Locator Review
A breakthrough in saving lives at sea

by Staff
Blue Water Sailing

"I always thought it might happen to someone else, never to me," wrote Ted Sierks in a 1951 article for Yachting. "But there I was in the drink, more than a thousand miles out of San Pedro and 880 miles from Honolulu. My ship had disappeared over my limited horizon in the frothy seas . . . ."

It was 0730 when Sierks went overboard. A lifeline gave way during a boom repair in a big following sea aboard L'Apache, a 73-foot cutter racing in the Transpac. A mate threw a life ring with light over the side, which Sierks was able to grab and, as he noted from his front-row seat, "The crew did a beautiful job of dousing the kites in that heavy sea and starting the engine as they came around in 26 minutes and got within 200 yards of me."

L'Apache crisscrossed the area for three hours, a crewman in the first spreaders scanning the surface of the sea, before it disappeared altogether. "I entertained no thoughts whatever of being picked up," he wrote fatalistically. "I've been around the sea for some 30 years and I know the practical impossibility of ever finding a bobbing head in a sea like that."

Until recently, this was the conventional wisdom. In his storm procedures article in the September 1999 issue of Blue Water Sailing, circumnavigator Evans Starzinger said as much: "The rule offshore - in heavy weather and especially at night - is don't fall off the boat. The odds of a successful crew-overboard recovery are low in these situations." Well, with the refinement of a water-activated transmitter and introduction of a new cockpit locator antenna by Emerald Marine Products, now those odds could be considerably better.

Early last summer, BWS took the Automatic Lifesaving Emergency Radio Transmitter or Alert System on a 1,500-mile passage from the British Virgin Islands to our home port of Newport, RI Having frequently cruised as a couple, as a family with young children, and as part of two- and three-person crews with solo watches, we were impressed with the concept and wanted to check out the at-sea execution. Some 800 miles north of the B.V.I. we broke out the Alert System for a sea trial.

System components include:

1. Receiver: The AR100 receiver in our demo kit - a water-resistant 6" x 5" x 11/2" black box with hard-mounting bracket weighing 12 ounces - came rigged with its own battery pack, so we didn't have to wire into the boat's 12-volt system. The receiver has a three-way toggle that switches to On/Off settings and to Alarm Silenced after the 95dB MOB alarm mounted on the front panel has been acknowledged. The AR100 receiver's relay contacts can mark your position on a compatible GPS or Loran. For solo sailors, they can shut down an engine once the alarm is triggered. We duct-taped it on a flat spot under the dodger. The operating and storage temperatures are, respectively, -4 F to 130 F and 140 F to 158 F

2. Receiver antenna: The 18-inch white fiberglass whip antenna has a nylon ratchet base and 25 feet of coax cable for mounting on the stern rail. Emerald Marine's only requirements are that (1) it is mounted two feet from such metal objects as outboard motors and barbecues and (2) that it be in the "line-of-sight" of the victim. Because this was a temporary installation, we simply duct-taped the antenna to the starboard rail of the stern pulpit.

3. Transmitter: The standard Alert AT100 model that we tested is housed in a 1.3" x 2.3" x 5.3" high-impact/high-visibility yellow polycarbonate case. It has three settings: Off, Armed and Manual On. The Armed setting is switched on when the transmitter is being worn; Manual on is used when the device is tested. Weighing in at eight ounces, the water-activated transmitter with flashing Xenon strobe light (10 flashes per minute for at least 60 minutes) is powered by two AAA batteries. The Alert AT100, which transmits at a frequency of 418 MHz, reportedly has a maximum range in optimum conditions of one-third of a mile (1,760 feet).

The transmitter is meant to be worn in its dedicated nylon pouch high on the body; say, attached near the shoulder with hook-and-loop fastening on a safety harness or near the top closure of a life vest or flotation jacket. It is worth noting that, without some form of flotation apparel, the unit would have to be held in the air in order for its signal to effectively reach the transmitter. A label on the front of the transmitter proclaims: Caution: After activation, unit must be out of the water to transmit signal. This begged the question: Would the signal be received only when the transmitter was at the crest of a wave?

According to Emerald Marine, a prototype transmitter - the Alert2 - has a range three times the original model or one mile (5,280 feet). The Alert2 has been developed for U.S. Coast Guard vessels, which travel fast and, thus, require greater range. Being roughly half the size and weight of the original transmitter (it is contained within a diving flashlight body) and having twice the range, the Alert2 does not include a strobe, but, as Emerald Marine points out, a number of excellent rescue strobes are on the market - notably ones manufactured by ACR and Forespar, which are available through West Marine. At the time of our test, the Alert2 was scheduled to be in production by last August.

4. Man Overboard Locator: The Alert/DF Man-Overboard Locator/Direction Finder, introduced last spring, is the newest component of the system - and perhaps the most significant. Knowledge of a crew-overboard situation has little meaning if the location of the victim cannot quickly be discerned, especially if injury has been incurred or the crew has gone overboard in cold water in which hypothermia is a serious threat.

The Locator is simply a handheld directional antenna with 25 feet of cable that plugs into the AR100 Receiver. The idea is that you scan the ocean with the antenna until it starts emitting loud and sustained beeps and a red light is activated, which means that it picked up the signal triggered when the transmitter carried by the crew overboard became immersed. We stored the Locator in a cockpit locker. If we ever our own boat with the Alert System, we'd fashion a permanent mount for the Locator/Direction Finder on a clear vertical inside surface of a cockpit locker or lazarette.

The Sea Trial

Although the sea was flat at test time, the high-seas forecast promised 20 to 30 knots on the port quarter later in the day, and being shorthanded, we chose not to put a person overboard for the test. Instead, we ballasted a life jacket with lead sinkers, attached the AT100 Transmitter in "armed" mode to it, switched on the receiver, and balanced it on the sugar-scoop so that a sudden lurch of the boat would jettison it into the sea. We were motorsailing at about seven knots in light air with full main and genoa, but the speed with which the "victim" disappeared in our wake was chilling, and even though it was only a life jacket, we knew what it could have been, and fervently hoped that the Alert System would work.

Because the PFD was more buoyant than a human body, the action of a couple of waves was necessary to immerse the transmitter and trigger the alarm. Unfortunately, this occurred in about 30 seconds; immersion would have been instantaneous had a live person gone over and, thus, the alarm would have gone off almost immediately.

Even though we had planned this maneuver, when the alarm finally sounded the three of us still were a bit flustered, tripping over one another as we mobilized. While one of our crew of three furled the jib, sheeted in the main, and began a 180; the second spotted; and the third reached into the locker for the already rigged handheld direction-finder.

By the time the Locator was removed from the locker and switched on, the alarm silenced, and the sweeping begun, the "victim" was a good 500 feet away. The designated sweeper scanned the water in the general direction of the victim, and for a minute or so, the Locator was sickeningly silent. As the boat moved closer to the victim, a persistent beeping sounded and the Locator was pointing directly at the bright-yellow life jacket, which was visible 100 yards off the starboard quarter.

When the Locator was pointed away from the transmitter, there was silence; only when it was pointed directly at the transmitter did the Locator signal go off, which enables the search crew to get a very accurate bearing with which to effect a rescue. The maximum range we were able to get from the AT100 Transmitter was 700 to 1,000 feet, far short of the 1,700 to 2,000 feet promised by the manufacturer, but the range we could achieve was still most comforting. However, a strobe light probably would have been just as effective, and we couldn't help but conclude that the Alert2 transmitter with the greater range would have been more appropriate for the task. We did not test the Alert2, but believe that the future of the Alert System lies in the transmitter designed for the Coast Guard. Its greater range will allow a bit of a cushion when someone goes overboard, there is initial shock, confusion reigns, cables get tangled, crews trip over themselves, and an MOB slips quickly astern and out of view.

And what became the fate of old Ted Sierks? He fought and killed with his rigging knife - by evisceration, no less - a brown and yellow shark, he entertained two more sharks that circled and nudged for three hours. He tried unsuccessfully to flag down a rescue plane from Honolulu. In the dark of night, he was nearly run down by four destroyer escorts, two of which returned at dawn but turned away at the last moment. He endured countless stings from swarms of jellyfish. And some 30 hours after he'd fallen overboard, Ted Sierks called it a day and was rescued by the USS Douglas Munro.

In those Dark Ages of electronics and safety gear, Sierks naturally credited the Almighty for his rescue, saying, "Everyone who was thinking of me out there in the water wove together a pattern of miracles under God's direction to bring me back." He then listed further safeguards to be taken on offshore boats: smoke pots for daylight MOB marking, sea dye at the ready on the stern pulpit to help aircraft spot a person in the water, double gaskets in rescue lights, and shark repellent as permanent party on life rings.

But that was nearly half a century ago, and back then it did take a miracle laced with superlative seamanship to retrieve a mate who'd gone over the side. Today, we have GPS units with dedicated SAVE keys to punch for instant storing of crew-overboard positions; we have countless effective crew-overboard retrieval aids; we have mini-EPIRBS to wear on PFDs; we have the Figure-Eight, Fast-Return and Quickstop/Lifesling retrieval maneuvers; and now we have the Alert Man-Overboard Alarm System.

In our test, the maximum effective range of the original Alert Locator was 1,000 feet; L'Apache came within 200 feet of Ted Sierks and never saw him. We have reason to believe that had L'Apache had the Alert rigged in the cockpit back in 1951, even with the original low-range transmitter, Ted Sierks would have been back aboard within an hour.

Prices of the Alert components