Ghost boat with GPS leads father-son duo to man overboard | Hacker News Reader

Ghost boat with GPS leads father-son duo to man overboard

garmin.com

593 pointshnburnsy285 comments

This guy was incredibly lucky. Wear a life jacket. Carry a means of calling for help on your person. Ideally a Personal Locator Beacon (>£150), a handheld marine VHF radio (>£75), at least a phone in a waterproof pouch.

In water less than 15ºC[0] average life expectancy follows very roughly a rule of threes. Three minutes without a life jacket, 30 mins without suitable warm clothing, 3 hrs without a life raft, 3 days without water and 3 weeks without food.

I volunteer for a marine SAR unit and people fall in and die from causes 1 and 2 on that list all the time, at least once a year just in our patch.

[0] Eg pretty much all U.K. waters pretty much all the time.

I didn’t learn until late in life that you’re not dying of hypothermia in that water as I’d always been lead to believe. Your muscles get too cold to respond and you just drown. Horrifying.

Does regular warm clothing keep you warm in 15c water or are you referring to a wetsuit or equivalent?

Probably a wetsuit or survival suit are the only relevant clothing to help with a prolonged submersion situation

Your general point is totally valid -- cold water is dangerous. But your survival times for 15C are ridiculously pessimistic. 15C is just not that cold! The table here shows longer expected survival times than that even at 0C:

https://seagrant.umn.edu/programs/recreation-and-water-safet...

Survival even without floatation at 15C is measured in hours.

With training and when you are expecting to go into the sea yes obviously you can swim 20 miles across the English channel but all the cardiac arrests from cold water shock and general panic in the first 15 seconds bring the average down. The rule of 3 makes it easier to remember; they are approximate average numbers which are meant to drive the point home which is to wear a life jacket. We would prefer to find you shivering on a beach than face down in the sea.

This has nothing to do with trained cold water swimmers. Your figure is just completely off. 15C water does not kill people in three minutes. It does not cause cardiac arrest. An average person could last hours at that temperature. See the well cited link I provided.

Lying to people to try and encourage safe behaviour isn't wise. The truth is good enough.

https://rnli.org/safety/know-the-risks/cold-water-shock

he did say what brings that number down (it's an average). and yes, jumping/falling into cold water can lead to shock/cardiac arrest

Amazing story and the pilot of that boat is lucky to be alive. I think larger center consoles should ship standard with a wireless safety lanyard instead of a wired one, because very few people seem to actually use the wired lanyard because it’s inconvenient. this is the exact situation where that would help.

Wireless lanyard, today I learned! Looks like a complete setup from 'FELL Marine' can be had for less than 300 bucks. That is very little money for peace of mind.

60% 1 star ratings on Amazon (failing device), still no peace of mind but better than nothing :-(

I was not able to reproduce this result. Can you link?

I assume this. https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B075MMHYMK/

Overall the rating is pretty good but definitely a number of one stars.

The challenge with a lot of safety and backup systems is that you might never need them, but if you do need them they absolutely have to work.

For what it's worth I flipped through the 1 star, 2 star, and 3 star reviews and found one that indicated a false negative, the rest seemed to indicate false positive. With it being a predominantly self-installed electrical system I question if every reviewer's install was done correctly.

All the failure modes seem to have to do with the engines not starting when someone needs them, which sounds ok to me.

Or maybe that’s survivorship bias, and the ones where the engines do not properly cut out are never in a position to review.

I doubt literal survivorship bias plays much of a role, given the number of people who actually die this way is tiny. Maybe that was a joke though.

The XKCD issue would be more common though - people who are happy with it because they've never had to test it.

https://www.amazon.ca/product-reviews/B075MMHYMK/ref=acr_dp_... top result in Canada

That listing has two total ratings, one is 5 star and one is 1 star, with no textual reviews. Doesn't feel like useful data to me.

https://xkcd.com/937/

This got me thinking about survivorship bias in ratings for life-saving devices. If the device fails to save your life, you're not going to be able to give it a poor rating.

Anyone who buys a safety system from Amazon is completely out of their gourd.

What difference does it make? Is an iPhone from Amazon worse than one from the Apple Store?

Even with something so _standard_ the likelihood of getting a knockoff on Amazon is orders of magnitude higher than Apple Store.

Buying a device directly from the vendor comes with a degree of responsibility that you can't afford with buying from 3rd parties (seller), on a 3rd party marketplace (amazon).

Amazon's never sold fake iPhones as they would be easy to spot, however they have sold, say, dangerous eclipse glasses. Most people do not have the equipment or expertise to test eclipse glasses before relying on it to save their sight.

I installed the Fell Marine Mob+ myself on my 23 foot day cruiser a year ago and it works very well.

The only problem I've had is false positive cut-offs when I'm on the dock untying or when I prepare to dock and I use the arm with the wireless FOB on in the rear compartments of the boat.

I could probably fix it by angling the antennae so that it was upright instead of pointing out horizontally behind the base unit, but TBH it's such a infrequent issue and only happens at no/low speed anyway that I haven't bothered.

On the plus side at least I know that it does cut the engine and probably would in a real situation as well.

Go out with a buddy sometime on a day with a light wind. Put your boat at a slow cruise and then jump off (carefully). See if you can actually get back to your boat before you’re exhausted (and need your buddy to pull around and pick you up).

In a light wind or current an average boat is still going to be moving faster than most people can swim.

The wireless kill switch is good. But pair it with an inflatable PFD.

It's a tough engineering challenge but it be cool if there was some kind of collapsible 'foot flippers' (is there a more technical term?) one could pull out of like a tube attached to a PFD.

I was watching the video of that boat that rolled at the Columbia river outlet in Oregon and the USCG rescue swimmer was astoundingly fast with the fins on.

There are folding fins now available for travelling scuba divers. However, they are still rather bulky and not practical for boaters to carry on a PFD. If the boat is moving faster than a couple knots you won't catch it even with fins.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/exotech/folding-fins-a-...

That's a very good suggestion actually. It's probably a very helpful, and I expect humbling, exercise.

(Have to remember to teach the buddy how to override the MOB-system so that he can actually start the engine after I go in the water though, lest it become a real situation)

I use a fanny-pack style autoinflating PFD which actually comes with a ring to connect the lanyard to. Definitely agreed you need both.

Absolutely concur. Michael Phelps swam an average 3.8 knots when he broke the 200M Freestyle world record. That's also with 4 pushes off a wall. You simply cannot keep up when your boat is going more than a knot unless you're an excellent swimmer who also happened to already be naked and barefoot when they fell in.

The key is to not fall off in the first place. One hand for you, one for the task. Also, if you're solo offshore you really should be wearing an auto-inflating PFD with tether and a PLB. Everybody has their own risk tolerances but if you don't wear one most of the time at least clip in when you take your pants down.

> One hand for you, one for the task.

Similar to '3 points of contact', which is my personal mantra. Reminds me to keep feet planted.

Many of the boaters who fall off have a high blood alcohol content.

Thankfully the USCG PFDs and tethers still work in the presence of ethanol.

I and friends owned a 40-foot sail yacht when we were younger. We did some experiments with people, dummies, and various items which had the same profile above water as a human (i.e. head-sized). We would drop (if it was cold) a dummy or a ball or something in the water, and then cry "man overboard!". The crew immediately dropped the sails, we didn't even consider lowering them - took too long. And turned on the engine and started searching. But even those few seconds were enough to lose sight of the dummy/person/soccer ball if the water was just a little bit choppy (typical nice sailing weather), because a sail yacht sits quite low in the water. We could hoist people up in the mast, but setting that up took too much time.

So, we introduced rules.

1) Nobody on the deck without clipping a safeguard line to their belt. Ever. We stretched a wire all the way both sides of the yacht, and everybody just clipped a lanyard to the wire. We could move relatively freely with that.

2) We put a flag on a fishing rod at the thin end and a floating element a foot from the thick end, and a weight at the thick end. If someone fell overboard, another crew member would immediately throw the thing in the water (we had it set up at the rear of the yacht), because that pole in the water is so much easier to see than a person, also from a long distance. NB: We didn't have anything like that Garmin tracker mentioned in the article - those things weren't available back then - but this actually worked pretty well when we tested it.

3) After all the testing we actually concluded that if someone fell overboard in choppy waters and if nobody saw and could throw the "flag pole" in the water we could as well just continue sailing. We never managed to find the soccer balls etc. we dropped in the water, whatever search pattern we used (those you find in books about rescue). Thus we established hard rule 1)

4) Zero alcohol unless we were moored for the night somewhere. This was a 100% enforced rule. It's incredible how little alcohol you need to decide to not bother with the lanyard when you just need a moment out there.

As part of the Royal Yacht Association “man overboard” training the instructor would throw a polystyrene head in the water and yell “man overboard”. We were taught that everyone not at the controls would point at the head until it was recovered. Helped enormously to have people extend their arms and keep their eyes on it. A head in open water is tiny. I thoroughly recommend RYA training.

At the sea scouts, we used a fender with a weight on one end. It would be unexpectedly be thrown overboard, and everybody was supposed to react immediately: yell "man overboard", have someone point, shout "swim!" at the man overboard (because sometimes they forget), and sail a certain pattern in order to arrive at the man overboard at a controlled course. We practices that dozens if not hundreds of times.

We did exactly that - well, one of the crew's job was to fix eyes on the head (not much point extending the arm, we turned the sailboat as quickly as we could), but due to being just a typical sail yacht's one meter above sea level it took only a few seconds of movement of the boat for the head to be invisible among the choppy waters.

I've briefly swum behind a boat that was anchored, but in a steady current (between some Danish islands). It's really like the boat is speeding away from you, even while anchored. (We had some safety measures which I mostly forgot, but it included a very long line behind the boat. Not sure if we were attached to that line.)

False negatives are more worrying. On a small speedboat, a common cause of death is that the captain falls overboard while the boat is doing a sharp turn at speed. The boat then does a 360 circle and within 10 seconds runs over the captain before anyone else in the boat can intervene.

Will these wireless keyfobs reliably cut out within 10 seconds when the boat never goes more than say 60 feet from the captain? I suspect not.

Would a wired one that went unused prevent that? That would seem to be the core problem in your scenario - the existing technology that would not have a false negative here is going unused.

Also, can you cite any sources for that event being common (relatively at least)? Not that I doubt you specifically, the scenario is just so horrifying that I am generally having trouble accepting it.

The accident described above is basically the same as happened in my hometown in October 2021. There was no one else in the boat but many witnesses on the shore. The whole community greatly affected.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/rockhampton/a...

Here is a news report with video footage of one such incident (the part where the victim is decapitated is clipped from the report): https://youtu.be/3IwhsYfnNvs

I am personally aware of quite a few speedboat related accidents, some fatal, and this is a common pattern.

The types of death that people imagine (boat sinks, boat engine dies and drifts out to sea) tend not to be killer in small boats because they mostly operate in busy waterways near shore where someone else will come help.

Is there a reason people can't just have seatbelts of some type for that?

By the inverse square law accuracy should be better at close range, cutting out at 10 to 30 feet but not 0 to 6 feet should be possible, especially with UWB, and even moreso if the fob detects water directly.

Radio waves propagate very poorly in water compared to air, so there's a good chance that the signal is lost as soon as the wearer falls in. From there it's just a matter of how long the timeout is, and the latency of cutting the engine.

The guy who fell in the water talks about that here: “Specifically, he wants people to know there are wireless killswitches available that can attach to passengers as well as the captain.”

https://www.wwaytv3.com/i-was-going-to-die-man-goes-overboar...

There’s some fishing guys on YouTube I watch and some of them have an app on their phone to shut the motor off. If they fall overboard the motor shuts off when the phone isn’t close enough. Some also wear automatically inflated life jackets but as a kayaker I don’t trust them.

Specifically for kayak-related reasons?

Most likely. They are not supposed to trigger when getting wet, even very wet, but are supposed to trigger when you go into the water.

You really shouldn’t wear an auto-inflating PFD in a situation where going into the water isn’t 100% a bad thing. Kayaking seems to be one of those activities where you wouldn’t want it. Even dinghy sailing/racing seems like a poor use case.

In case anyone is unfamiliar with them, though, they all have a manual pull handle that is supposed to trigger the CO2 canister, and as a 3rd backup they even have a tube you can pull up to your face and a one-way valve so you can blow them up with your mouth.

IMHO aUrooj inflated life jackets generally make no sense for kayaking. It’s too easy to end up in the drink casually and it’s like $60+ per re-arming kit.

Are those fishing kayaks so stable that they have very little expectation of going overboard comparable to being on a powerboat or sail boat? I use touring and whitewater kayaks myself.

I kayak and sail so I have life jackets for both use cases (two type V rescue jackets for kayaking and 4 type V inflatables for sailing to accommodate friends and better the much safer European spinlock deckvests, which are not USCG approved, so I keep USCG approved inflatables on board too)

> an app on their phone to shut the motor off.

The failure risk here is the phone doesn't go with you and it keeps chugging along.

This is doubled by the fact that lots of boaters will try to keep their phone as far from the water as possible for safety's sake. In practice, using your phone is better than using nothing at all, but a dedicated waterproof device that you can clip onto your clothes and forget about is by far the better option.

Most phones these days are pretty water resistant, so you could just keep it in your pocket.

More importantly, if you fall overboard, the value of your phone is probably the least of your worries.

I don't know about that. If the boat is moving and you're left stranded then yes, of course. If you fall off a stationary boat in warm weather and climb back on though, your destroyed phone might be at the top of the list of concerns. I can see why someone wouldn't want to carry around a non-waterproof phone on a boat. Even if the phone is waterproof (resistant), a zip-up pocket is probably a good idea. Water resistance wouldn't help you much if it's at the bottom of the ocean.

> Some also wear automatically inflated life jackets but as a kayaker I don’t trust them.

Do you trust them as an adult? Or in some other context? What about kayaking makes you distrust them? Should I, a non-kayaker, trust them?

I'm a sailor (yachts, not dinghys), not a kayaker.

> Do you trust them as an adult?

Yes. The alternative (ignoring the solid foam type of life jacket that you see kids wear) is a manually inflating one. They use the same CO2 cylinder with a bladder, but you have to pull a cord to inflate them. You can buy the exact same model of life jacket as auto or manual inflating. The auto inflating ones also have a cord you can pull if you need to.

There is some debate in the sailing community as to whether the auto or manual jackets are a better idea but most people go auto-inflating. With the manual ones you can manoeuvre better in the water if you don't inflate the jacket so you have a chance to swim to safety, perhaps climbing back on your boat, but if you get knocked unconscious or you're in shock (or the boats still sailing) then that's going to be harder/impossible to do.

Personally me and my immediate family have auto inflating ones, this model specifically: https://crewsaver.com/uk/products/16708/ErgoFit190N. We have some more basic models for guests. I figure I'm unlikely to be sailing single handed and the best chance of survival offshore is getting picked up by the crew of the boat you were just in. Plus, I'm in NW UK, cold water shock is a real thing. Staying afloat in the middle of the sea is going to be the main thing you're going to want to be concentrating on.

> Or in some other context? What about kayaking makes you distrust them?

I wouldn't wear an auto-inflating jacket anywhere that I'm likely to get dunked in the water as a matter of course. You'll just inflate the jacket when you don't want to, it will be completely in the way and you will have to deflate it and it's then mostly useless until it's repacked with a new gas cylinder. Plus, you're unlikely to be in the big seas that would make an auto-inflater safer.

That said, it can get wet enough on a sailing yacht that jackets can get wet enough to be inflated, but that's very uncommon. Pretty funny though :)

> Should I, a non-kayaker, trust them?

It depends what you're doing. Sailing, going out on a pleasure boat, day trips, weeks at sea, then sure. Stick one on each of your family and guests, show them the pull cord and tell them not to pull it unless they need to, and you can pretty much rest assured that if they fall in they're going to float until you can get to them. You can also get beacons you can add to them, I've added them to mine.

*edit* Here's someone testing the lifejacket I have https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09y_AM36v0M

I did approximately no research on them when I was buying a life jacket recently. My thinking is that you're probably only going to need it to work once and at that point, you really, REALLY, need it to work. If they deploy with no issues 999 times out of a thousand, I don't want to play the odds of the one time being the aforementioned 1 time out of a thousand it doesn't deploy. On the other hand, a conventional life jacket floats on a count of the way it floats. There's plenty of comfortable conventional life jackets out there and they're much cheaper than the less-bulky ones that deploy in the water.

What you're likely talking about I (and everyone I know in the sailing community) would call a buoyancy aid not a life jacket. They'll help you stay afloat but you'll have to put effort in. Not something you can do for hours, or if you're unconscious or in cold water shock.

In the sailing community a life jacket would tend to be either a much bulkier statically buoyant thing (picture the large orange things kids wear on sailing holidays or boat rides) or more commonly an inflating one. Of that last category auto-inflating is more popular. Remember, auto-inflating life jackets also have a pull cord that you can use if the auto inflation mechanism doesn't trigger.

If you were sailing on my boat there is no way you'd get away with wearing a buoyancy aid. I don't know what the failure rate of auto (or manual) inflating life jackets is (I bet it's less than 1 in 1000), but a buoyancy aid will not provide enough buoyancy 100% of the time in the sea.

Don't get me wrong, I will wear a buoyancy aid, but I wouldn't class it as a life jacket, and it would be in certain situations like kayaking or paddle boarding perhaps.

I can't remember what class the one I've got is. PFD is the term. It's been a while since I've spent any kind of time on the water. It is intended to roll you onto your back and for situations where you're not going to be far from rescue. It's is definitely not intended for the ocean though. Wouldn't do the great lakes in it unless I was staying close to shore. Or any of the big ones up north honestly.

The context here was kayaking. In that very unlikely scenario that your auto-inflating life jacket doesn't deploy, there is a very likely scenario that you're disoriented or unconscious. That's a big risk in any scenario where you need a PFD and the reason I'd rather go with an always-deployed one appropriate for conditions than hope I have my head on straight if I get dumped overboard and things get worse from there.

As a kayaker, it is possible to capsize. You should know how to flip yourself back over. If your life vest inflates while you are capsized, you are dead or going to have a very bad day stuck sideways while your craft fills with water. Once it fills, it will sink. If you don’t get out before that happens, your life vest won’t save you.

Basically, as a kayaker, you only want a life vest once you are out of the boat and you can’t get back to your boat or to the shore.

Shouldn’t a kayaker already be wearing a PFD? In my state they are mandatory. They make PFDs that work specifically with kayaks and their lowered seating.

In many states it’s mandatory to have one at all times but not mandatory to be actually worn at all times.

As long as the item that could have saved your life is in the trunk of your car, you're fine?

So take your phone when you fall off.

I mean, then you could probably call someone.

If you've got coverage out there.

This story took place 20km out at sea.

This is one of those things that I always wondered about.

The risks are really apparent though for anyone out on a boat and it just doesn't seem to be the standard operating procedure for most folks.

This is not something I ever considered until I played Stormworks, and my boat kept running away from me every other hour.

Moreover, the lanyard should include a panic button that sends out a SOS from the boat's radio.

I remember reading that 70% of the male bodies the coast guard recovers have their zipper down. I frequently fish offshore alone here in SE Florida and when I have to go I pee in an aft corner and wash it down with the raw water hose.

Buckets are a thing.

If you think about it, a boat is basically a bucket.

Are you saying I should pee into the boat?

A bucket can also be a boat.

Even Noah's ark was a waterproof round wicker basket (coracle). Although good point, I never thought about what they did with all the animal waste.

In modern times, livestock is regularly shipped en masse from places with surplus arable land, like Australia, to places with a dearth of arable land, like Saudi Arabia, although I don't know what happens to the animal waste.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_export

Interesting tangent from reading that page, the 'Seagoing Cowboys':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seagoing_cowboys

I think the animal waste is washed into the sea. Presumably there are sumps on the deck and someone hoses the deck (and animals!) with seawater.

> Using the table below, and assuming one million head of cattle a year, 20 kilograms (44 pounds) of excrement per head per day, an average voyage time of 10 days and vessel loading and unloading times of five days, something in the order of 300,000 tons of excrement is pumped into the sea during these voyages each year. A similar calculation for sheep, voyaging more typically for 20 days, would add a further 85,000 tons.

> The excrement has a high water content and is considered benign. It is treated like sewage under Marpol Annex IV and doesn’t need to be treated before dumping far from shore.

https://maritime-executive.com/features/live-export-followin...

An imaginary waterproof round wicker basket, therefore quite light and permeable.

It’s like the semipermeable membrane in all those gas problems from stat mech.

People who take the story literally today (largely American evangelicals), are usually also pretty adamant that they should take the dimensions in Genesis 6:15 literally - "The ark is to be three hundred cubits long, fifty cubits wide and thirty cubits high"[1] and made of "cypress wood" coated in "pitch".

Can you tell me where the "round wicker basket" description came from?

[1] NIV Footnote: That is, about 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high or about 135 meters long, 23 meters wide and 14 meters high

I'm not that commenter but it's actually really interesting! There's a Babylonian tablet that predates Genesis by some time and has very similar instructions. A group in India actually built one following the tablet's instructions!

https://www.telegraphindia.com/7-days/the-ark-that-finkel-bu...

A key excerpt from above link:

> So was there an actual flood of biblical proportions in Babylon? Finkel believes that there was a real fear of flooding and stories of death and destruction that arose from these anxieties. 'The myth of the flood story, to build the boat, is an antidote to this very fear.'

I love rational explanations for mythology and it makes so much sense to me that periodic flooding would have been a problem since the dawn of agrarian civilization, and it makes sense that our forebears would have aspired to this idea of having the doomsday raft ready to go when the big one hits.

my personal theory based on nothing but it makes sense to me for the time period, is that if there is truth to the story, it was actually referring to saving domesticated farm animals so Noah and fam could start over.

There's a lot of ancient stories about a massive flood in that area with someone building a boat and saving animals, so maybe that's a thing that really happened. But it's most likely a massive river (Eufrates & Tigris?) flood or possibly even the filling of the Black Sea deluge[0], and involved mostly farm animals, not lions and kangaroos.

(As a Christian I'm totally comfortable with the idea that some stories in the Bible are just stories and don't have to be literally true.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea_deluge_hypothesis

Hmm.. the ‘myth as an antidote to fear’ idea only makes sense if humans were on the ark. It makes more sense interpreted as a warning as to the coming future. The earth will survive no matter what, you may not. Making minds and hearts fear, not fear antidote.

In my experience female passengers especially appreciate a bucket with a privacy towel.

It sounds like an offhand factoid (i.e a myth), just such a typical thing that happily spreads.

The first safety instruction I received from my skipper on joining her boat was, "pee in the head, not overboard".

It's not a myth.

> 70% of the male bodies the coast guard recovers have their zipper down

If this is not a myth, we should be able to find the source.

doesn’t Home Depot or west marine sell a 5 gallon bucket sized toilet? That might keep your boat cleaner especially if you get hit by a rouge wave like right before you can rinse.

I was about to say urine is sterile: just go where you are, but it turns out that scientists have found some microbiota in urine. [0] All the same the germs don’t seem harmful unlike those found in feces, so just go where you are unless you’ve been eating asparagus or something.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4659483/

I'm one of those weird assholes who, after having read this, will have it instantly jolted back into my awareness in the unfortunate event I ever go overboard, causing me to zip my fly when I should be fighting for my life.

And yes, I do own a ocean-going vessel.

Perhaps it's an idea to secure yourself with a safety line when you need to pee on a boat.

I've sailed a lot on small, open boats, and I tend to lean against the rigging. That gives me something to hold onto.

In boats large enough to have multiple people on them, there is going to be a head available (in the US it's part of a tax loophole), but people still pee off the side. If you do so the other people on the boat very much appreciate you using the leeward-most part of the boat, where rigging is not always available.

If you heave-to whenever someone needs to relieve themselves, you get a double bonus - a smoother motion in the water and rigging to hold on to.

I forgot at what course I used to do it. Possibly several, but yeah, always leeward of course. But even at regular beam reach[0], you can still stand between the sail and the shroud[0]. At broad reach[0] or running downwind[0], you can also use the fore stay[0].

[0] I have no idea what the English words for sailing terms are, so I'm googling all of this. Hopefully correctly.

You have the right words :)

I would imagine a similarly high portion of bodies have BAC

Good job tricking me into reading a Readers Digest -Drama in real life / Garmin advertisement...

The moral of the story is to pee in a cup

Or at least to stop the engine while you pee

Or at least put your life jacket and lanyard back on.

getting used to peeing in bottles might just save your life one day

On a tangent — if you were to find a lost Garmin InReach device, Garmin won't let you notify its owner: https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=gpi2lWn8aE0dPyEfx6wQ78

Assuming the device has been lost for a while, it's likely that its subscription is over, thus you cannot use it to contact any of the previous owner contacts, which makes sense from privacy perspective, yet I see no reason why Garmin will deliberately not have any process of notifying the owner once your possession of the device has been established

I think that makes sense, many people don’t want their contact info given out to someone who happened to find their lost device. If they wanted that, they could always just add a keychain tag with their name and phone number to the device

Simple solution is for Garmin to accept and reship the device since they already know the owner?

Which might be too much of a hassle for them to take on for occasional lost devices. But passing on contact info of the finder doesn't seem too bad.

I agree and pointed to the fact that it makes sense they wouldn't let you contact the owner directly and added that one solution could have been to have Garmin notify the owner that someone found their device.

When I lost my PLB (an emergency only type device) I contacted NOAA to notify them of it so that in case it accidentally gets activated, COSPAS SARSAT won't send an SAR team to the midi pyrenees. Not only did they respond within minutes but they told me that in case someone will find it and contact them, they can share my details (to which I happily agreed).

The Garmin inReach device allows you to display the owner's name on the home screen.

https://www8.garmin.com/manuals/webhelp/GUID-802DEF62-EBB2-4...

If there are any contacts set then you will also be able to see their names, phone numbers, and emails even if the satellite service subscription is inactive. Any saved GPS tracks or waypoints will also be visible. Those devices have no security features and can't be locked like a smartphone.

My first thought is a great safety feature would be a remote engine cutoff you could wear when you are single-handed. Something like what jet skis have but maybe Bluetooth? (downthread: wireless lanyard)

Must have been absolutely terrifying watching the boat motor away.

What a way to go, taking a piss off the side. I do it all the time, but not 40 miles off shore!

If I’m sailing that far offshore the rule is you can’t leave the cockpit without a lifeline, if it’s night and in daytime if someone else isn’t above deck watching you.

I've been sailing on a lake in a dinghy and a wind shift caused the boom to knock me out of the boat, it was a terrible feeling.

Lots of boats you have a safety line to keep you attached, but the problem is that people tend not to use them.

So what did you do? Evidently you didn’t drown.

They were sailing so the dinghy presumably didn’t promptly drive away like in this story.

The main sheet (rope controlling the sail) was cleated and it didn't just keep sailing along.

Most sailing dinghys should have weather helm and will turn up into the wind, causing the boat to end up in irons (mainsail luffing and depowered)

I tried to swim after it, but power boat got me and took me back to my boat.

At a summer camp with sailing and instructors in powerboats for safety.

I know with sailing you want your boat to have weather helm so it turns up into the wind and eventually ends up in irons, but if you have autopilot engaged, you can’t forget that. Do you know if any of the newer autopilot systems will head up into the wind if they lose contact with the remote that singlehanded sailors will attach to their vest?

I’ve seen lots of videos of singlehanded sailors where they aren’t wearing tethers in nicer weather.

The main reason you want your boat to have a bit of weatherhelm is because it makes the boat go faster upwind. And just because you have slight weatherhelm at optimal upwind trim does not mean the boat will fall into irons if the helmsman goes away.

There are devices to shut off the autopilot for a MOB alarm, but that won't stop the boat. And even if they did put the boat head to wind or heave to, you can't swim fast enough to catch even a drifting sailboat because it has so much more windage than you.

My ancient autopilot certainly doesn’t support it. Nor the engine panel.

I’ve never worn a tether except at night in “blue water”. It’s a bit of a stupid risk, but it’s absolutely true the most likely moment to go over is when standing right up on the edge so you don’t hit the boat when you relieve yourself!

In hindsight you’re definitely gonna be wishing you just got a little piss on the hull.

I have this https://www.amazon.com/FELL-Marine-Wireless-Switch-Basepack/... on my 23 foot day cruiser and I'm very happy with it.

Sometimes cuts when I'm on the dock untying etc but could probably be improved by adjusting the antennae orientation.

Cutting off your control authority at the worst possible time would definitely be the risk trade-off!

I agree that in general that would be something to avoid. But in my case the probability * consequence math for the usual scenarios is still fairly low.

When untying it only cuts once in a while when doing the bow lines and I'm still attached at the stern, so no risk there.

When preparing to dock it's only if I need to find and prepare extra rope from some of the most aft compartments, which I do well ahead of when I need them and not during "critical phases of operation".

If I expect to be running around a lot during docking I take the FOB off and place it on the dashboard. I don't leave the helm unless the gear is in neutral, and if I fall in the water I'm usually within 20 meters of land which I'm fairly certain I'd be able to reach :)

This was a nice story -- of smart and prepared people, dropping what they were doing to do the right thing against the odds, with some luck/divine help, to save someone -- and I think I'm going to stop online stuff on a high note for this Sunday. :)

This video about the "algorithm" the Coast Guard uses to search for missing mariners in moving water is pretty fascinating:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoXJfuPaFF8

>> Sascha had gone to the side to relieve himself and simply fell overboard. He’d reached for the railing to grab it on the way down, but he missed. And that was it — his boat sped away without him, nearly 40 miles away from shore.

There is an old story told about how most drowning victims are found with their fly open... drunk people peeing into the water slip and fall into that water. I don't know anything about this particular incident, but peeing off a dock or over the edge of a boat is always dangerous. You are doing something very routine at the point where land meets water. Even without alcohol/drugs, overconfidence with a routine task quickly leads to big mistakes. (I saw similar incidents with people who decided pee over the edge of cliffs. Don't do that.)

... where should you pee?

> where should you pee?

The head. If there isn’t one, give a buddy a heads up.

In this case there was no buddy either.

Really if you ever need to go the edge of the boat you should be tied in. This is especially true with sailboats since you often work at the edge of the boat doing things like pulling lines or other actions where you can easily lose balance or the boat can quickly shift.

If you are sailing in open water like this, miles from shore, especially solo, you should be tying yourself whenever you go to the edge of the boat. This is standard equipment on most boats, a full-body harness (often intergrated with an CO2 inflated life vest and water activated beacon). There is a big industrial caribiner style clip you clip onto the railing or similar with so that if you fall overboard you can pull yourself back. The rig is similar to what you would wear while roofing a house.

This applies to all offshore boating, but if you are ever boating solo, even more precaution should be taken to do this.

Cut a piece of plastic bottle to make a portable urinal

Who is downvoting this? This is very literally the key life-and-death question.

Too bad if there's some humor in it. You have to live with that sometimes.

Deactivate the propulsion before peeing. Maybe even drop anchor? If you fall overboard you could probably get back onboard.

Anchors are only a thing very very close to land. Few boats carry a thousand-foot anchor rope.

Anchors do not need to touch the bottom of the ocean for them to slow the watercraft down or reduce its drift. Anchors are very much a thing far away from shore.

You should clip on. If you're moving around anywhere you could possibly fall over, and you're alone or the water isn't calm or you're far from shore or basically any other risk factor, you clip yourself to the jacklines first.

If you're alone and can't stop and don't have anything the other commenters mentioned and your boat is fiberglass and in good condition? Just pee inboard on the deck in a place with good drainage and wash it off. Can't be much worse than the droppings that birds provide.

But, personally in general (car camping especially) I like the humble pee bottle. At Walmart in the RV section they have the blue chemicals used in portable toilets and plane lavatories and the like. You can get it in a little tide pod format. Cuts the smell and keeps things sterile. Drop that into any container (preferably non-translucent and 2+ liters) add a little water and you've got your own miniature portable toilet.

You can also buy a real portable toilet, they are quite nice these days, but can be bulky. The keyword to find them is "cartridge toilet" because typically the waste volume is a container that is detached and carried to the dump point. I once hiked 3 miles holding one of these portable toilets just so I could take a dramatically scenic (and civilized) poop and it was absolutely worth it.

I think a bucket is more traditional...

Or at least pee from behind a railing of some sort so that when you slip you won't fall outside the boat.

Note that the railing has to be high enough that even with the swaying of the boat, it's not going to hit you below your center of mass. A lot of boat railings aren't tall enough.

Bucket

Gatorade bottle (the dude even had his own supply according to TFA)

Worst case, on deck near the drain holes, then wash it off

> doing something very routine at the point where land meets water

Men are also doing something that typically requires two hands on an unstable platform with limited visual cues for the horizon.

> requires two hands

That's quite a humble brag!

Two guys are relieving themselves into a river.

First guy: Boy, that water is cold.

Second guy: And deep, too!

More serious answer. The drunk man’s lean is a tale as old as time. Get your zipper down, get situated, and your left arm goes against the wall to stop the world from moving out from under you. You should only need both hands for a moment. Less if you’ve practiced.

Don’t some boats have a tether to the power key, like treadmills?

If my memory serves, every boat I've ever been on has had one. In my experience though, it rarely gets used, especially if the individual driving is also fishing. The article states that Scheller was trolling at the time, so he likely wanted to be able to leave the console and grab his rod at a moment's notice. Reckless as it may be, driving with the power key attached to the console in some way rather than yourself makes that process faster and much easier. It's a trade-off between convenience and safety that, unfortunately, leads many to favor convenience a majority of the time.

Seems like there should be some inexpensive way to buy/built a BTLE “kill switch” that hooks onto your belt. (And indeed a simple search turns up such a product for about $200.)

Killing the power can help in some situations, but nowhere near all of them. A small boat moves very differently than a person treading water. It drifts in the wind. A swimmer doesn't. Even with the engine off, there is a good chance that he wouldn't get back on. And a one-foot wave isn't so small when your eyes are only a couple inches above the water. You need a positive connection between you and boat.

The tethered dead man's cutoff is a norm on small outboards. I seem to recall it is even a legal requirement to use it in some jurisdictions (including clipping it to the skipper's body). But on anything out in the ocean like this with a larger outboard with a separate steering station it is not something that is normal at all. There are products that achieve the same outcome including wearable beacons that will shut the motor off if you get separated, but they are not common and a little expensive.

Why?? Use one hand.

I can’t undo a zipper with one hand, but power to those who can.

Also true of the tourist corpses fished out of the icy canals of Amsterdam in winter.

Usually told at the the start of a trip as the “harnesses always on when solo on deck or at night” policy is explained to crew.

Imagine being stuck overboard like this and then, after two and a half hours, seeing your own boat coming back to pick you up.

... or finish you off. It's become sentient! swims away furiously

Since I know how it left me, this would have me feeling a bit uneasy.

It's a great story but kind of gross the way Garmin slides in an ad for its products being supposedly easy to use even for people who haven't used them before

It’s not smooth but not terrible considering this is corporate blog content, not journalism.

At least they link to the original article which, after a quick scan, seems much better written.

https://www.readersdigest.co.uk/inspire/life/how-a-fisherman...

Much better link, thanks!

Reader's Digest is not "journalism." They take a fairly simple and straightforward event and embellish the hell out of it to make into some grand tale, keeping it at about a 5th grade reading level.

Compare and contrast the story to the local TV station writeup:

https://www.wistv.com/2021/07/07/father-son-rescue-missing-b...

Two fishermen see a boat with nobody piloting it, alert the coast guard, follow the breadcrumb trail on the GPS unit, and find the boat's owner. Owner is OK.

This story is why you wear the safety disconnect cord, or purchase a cable-less shutoff system that uses an radio-beacon fob you wear. Or, you don't go deep-water solo...

Perhaps journalism wasn’t the word I should have used there. What would you call writing about factual events in a way that makes them interesting to read?

That said, I don’t think captivating writing is outside the bounds of true journalism. Some might argue that’s what journalism is supposed to be. I.e., “here’s an interesting event and here’s why it’s interesting.”

Learned from the best https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOHj5kGU4fY

yea this was quite the heartstrings pulling ... advertisement

But apparently it's okay when Apple convinces millions of unprepared people that their iphone will save them if they get lost or in trouble in the wilderness?

The Apple "safety" features have cost more lives than they've saved due to first responders wasting time on fake iAlerts that keep them away from real emergencies.

The car crash detection, maybe. The fall detection seemed to have been a success though.

A woman used the SOS feature recently to get rescued, so .. yes?

Who said it’s okay? All the media coverage I have seen point to this iPhone feature being a pain in the ass for first responders (skiers generating an inordinate amount of fake calls).

Also, please point to hard data and all the lives this has actually cost.

The ski falling story has been making the rounds. And I can certainly see skiing as a fertile source for false fall detection alerts. I would (try to remember to) disable it if I were downhill skiing if I otherwise had it active--which I don't. (And really haven't decided if I should or shouldn't.) But I also haven't actually seen data that this is a genuine problem much less one that is overwhelming emergency services and causing widespread carnage.

As for the satellite SOS, actual search and rescue people I've talked to have been of the opinion that they'd rather someone who is in trouble or thinks they're in trouble reach out for help sooner rather than later. It doesn't mean a full-scale rescue needs to be mounted. Someone can often be talked through what their problem is. It's also not like people didn't already have this capability so long as they were in cell phone coverage.

My next thought was "are Garmin and Gatorade associated?".

It's on their own website. Can you blame them for promoting their own product? Marketing isn't journalism.

Here's a header that fixes it: "We at Garmin believe it's essential for our products to be easy to use, and can be lifesaving. Here's a story that illustrates it." Not hard to add instead of starting it like your just going to tell a story.

So be even more self-promotional? Can't please everyone...

It's... on their site? Not sure I'd object to the company publishing the story advertising for themselves. If NYT or WaPo can go "nope, you've read enough, buy a subscription", Garmin can unobtrusively go "hey thanks for reading, consider buying something we make" =D

> had the Garmin technology been less intuitive for an unfamiliar boater in a stressful situation — this story could’ve ended so much differently

This line made me look at the URL and realize I was reading an advertisement.

> The boat had a Garmin GPS marine system, and while Andrew said he hadn’t been familiar with Garmin units prior to that, it was easy to use, allowing him to figure it out quickly.

Got me

The article ended with:

> Andrew Sherman has since upgraded his tech on his own boat.

> “I bought a Garmin unit because I was so impressed with Sascha’s,” he said.

Definitely written to remind us all that Garmin GPS are easy to use. Oh yeah, someone's life was saved, but don't lose track on the shiny touchscreen GPS haha.

I saw the URL before reading the article, and was basically expecting the product placement as a punchline.

When your easy-to-use interface saves a man's life, I think you get a pass for one story.

Realistically, any GPS system would have done the same, whether you have to touch a screen or push buttons.

Wayfinding is like one of the most basic of features on these units.

With one touch delete of GPS history, these two would be heros sealed his fate while stumbling through our hierarchy of menus.

Upon returning to civilization and entering their story in the corporate bug tracker, their feature request was denied, as better history retention is in the +Pro model.

Anybody that has dealt with a marine GPS units can handle all of them. These aren’t sophisticated interfaces and the features they offer for the most part is standardized. It’s not like it controls a spaceship or something, it’s just a GPS unit.

Would a random passerby potentially fuck things up? Maybe, but realistically probably not. Would the guy that just jumped from moving boat to moving boat? No, they have obviously seen and used one of these before.

> Upon returning to civilization and entering their story in the corporate bug tracker, their feature request was denied, as better history retention is in the +Pro model.

Garmin, like practically every company out there, is well known to hide features behind premium models. Not sure exactly what point it is you’re trying to make but Garmin isn’t a magical snowflake who doesn’t partake in this practice.

How dare a company advertise their features with an interesting story! Get a grip.

Making the claim that somehow the magical interface of the Garmin saved this man is preposterous.

It’s a GPS unit. It’s not some magical device that pinpointed the person’s exact position overboard and led them right to it. They would have been able to do the exact same thing on literally any other unit out there.

As I said in another comment, Garmin is certainly entitled to post it but people are equally entitled to point out the ridiculous and hamfisted advertising.

Good luck trying to figure out how to do this on garmin’s handheld devices in a hurry!

> but kind of gross the way Garmin slides in an ad for its products

Gross? So we have a company that is in business to make money and employs people and spends money at other companies (that employ and give people jobs). And they can't do obvious marketing. And take advantage of a good opportunity to plug their product? Everybody and every company just has to be for the common good? Be humble no bragging and the world will be a path to your door?

They certainly can. And people are certainly able to comment on how hamfisted the marketing is. Freedom of speech and all that.

It’s a corporate blog. What do you expect them to write?

“The features of our GPS allowed a passerby to save an overboard boater. Really any generic GPS unit from Walmart would have done the same though.”

As I said, they're certainly free to say whatever they want to say. But people are free to criticize what they chose to write.

A less hamfisted approach would, for instance, remove the quotes from the guy which were clearly prompted by the PR folks at Garmin.

A little tacky, but bad UI does have consequences. Garmin UIs have always been fantastic in my experience.

The story is on garmin.com ... call me crazy but I don't find this the least bit "gross".

I'm with you. All this cringe culture stuff is really too much. It's been really annoying lately. Some sort of weird Puritan outbreak.

It would be much better to own up the pitch upfront. Like, start with a line at the top saying something like "We at Garmin believe it's essential for our products to be easy to use, and can be lifesaving. Here's a story that shows what we mean... " Instead the content _reads_ like a story about someone about to lose their life at sea. It's not a big lift but would likely make a big change to the perception I (and apparently others) have of this piece.

What?! If you invented something that saved a life, you bet your ass you'd be putting that on your company blog! Your post is not in the spirit of HN.

Anti advertising, anti big corporate and a negative slant on a feel good-story? It’s completely HN. It just lacks a more efficient search pattern recommendation and a blockchain reference. Turns our the guy treading water also used a very calorie inefficient leg stroke too.

Have we considered discussing what would happen on this page if Javascript were to be disabled?

Garmin has a rep for difficult to use devices so if they worked hard enough on this one that it could be used to save a guys life (which it was! The track was mission critical for this save), they get to brag a little about their role. This kind of story might even ingrain better UI as a priority inside their org which would be good for all their future customers

If I were an SEO manager, Garmin would be the dream job. They get so much excellent content with real, meaningful stories to tell. This article is pure SEO gold.

The inreach rescues always sound like they’d make for good movie plots!

I mean, I get that it's a Garmin press release, but did anyone else find the inserts about the GPS to be tacky?

A little bit, but hey, they're not hiding anything. Everyone is allowed to toot their own horn. I'd more pissed if this was some paid PR piece hidden in a newspaper.

To be fair, if the waypoints weren’t logged in the Garmin they would never have found the overboard man.

The waypoints could have been logged in anything. Any GPS, or even a Google location history on a phone they found.

The heroes of the story are the two men.

It would be like if someone were about to sucker punch a woman and you happened to be standing in the way. You're not a hero, you just happened to be present.

It's also a type of scare mongering. "You might fall overboard while peeing, and our product could save your life, just look at this phenomenally unlikely scenario!" The much smarter solution is to use a wireless lanyard or just pee inside the boat, as commented elsewhere here.

I usually would, but I actually didn’t find it tacky in this article up until the end where the article mentioned they were so impressed that they upgraded their own boat. That was just a little bit tacky, but not terrible given it was a press release. The rest is how I would talk about it while sailing. I often say “the Garmin” instead of “the chart plotter”.

Nah. Good PR is where you find it.

Not at all. It's necessary detail for the story to make sense, and of course Garmin is quite proud that their device played a role in saving a life.

I know what they mean about ease of use, too. In the early 2000's I had a Garmin eTrex GPS receiver, the little translucent green one. Did a lot of hiking and geocaching with it, hooked it to my laptop for wardriving, etc. And everything I ever asked it to do was so easy -- there was no touchscreen and the click-stick only had five "buttons", but the UI was just profoundly intuitive.

I said at the time that if Garmin ever made a cellphone (this was pre-smartphone and every phone reinvented its own craptastic UI), I'd buy one in a heartbeat. Of course they did release some Garmin-branded phones later, well into the Android era, and the UI is generic Android. So much for that, and more's the pity.

But I believe their marine instruments retain some of that old-fashioned intuition, so anyone could just walk up and figure out the interface. And that plays a role in the story, so it's absolutely relevant to mention.

There’s UX spillover from their avionics division, which has indirect funding via NTSB recommending/mandating improvements after accidents

Man, if you can figure out a Garmin just by walking up to one and figuring out the interface, you have several more degrees than most people. If you know one, you know most of the others, but if you know none, and you don't have the manual, those things are confusing af.

The nuvifone was based on embedded Linux and the UI was implemented in a mix of Qt and possibly Tcl/Tk. I’m not sure how much Android played into things, but there was definitely inspiration from the iPhone. It was the first phone Garmin put out.

If the story is true, why not use it for advertising?

Here's a link to a similar page for a completely different product: https://www.valentine1.com/v1-moments/

If you made a tool and you found out that someone used your tool to save someone’s life, wouldn’t you be proud of yourself for your good work? What’s the harm in sharing the good news?

>“We got done and they were like, ‘OK, roger that, Captain,’ and I was waiting for them to say to go find them, but of course they can’t tell you to do that, so we were just like, ‘OK. We’ll go find him.’”

Why can't the coast guard tell the first responder to try to find them? As a layperson I thought civilian ships were often coordinated with to help those in distress.

As most weird things along those lines in America, I can almost guarantee it's some sort of liability policy. They don't wanna be held responsible if a civilian gets themselves hurt/lost/killed trying to rescue someone, or does the same to the person they're trying to rescue, having being asked to or "ordered" by someone in a perceived position of authority like a coast guard officer.

I was thinking it was comparable to CPR/first aid instructions from 911 calls however seafaring is inherently more risky...

Makes me wonder if, in this age of Covid, 911 operators would ask callers to perform CPR. Even a "Do you know how to perform CPR" might be interpreted as an instruction to do so.

It makes a lot of sense to me in this case. As you suggest, even a "if you don't mind" from the Coast Guard could very reasonably be taken as a polite order which they may not have the authority to do in this case.

>They don't wanna be held responsible if a civilian gets themselves hurt/lost/killed trying to rescue someone,

That seems like a not unreasonable concern even if there was probably no material danger in this case.

That's not true. I don't know what happened in this incident, but the Coast Guard does have an official policy to request civilian assistance in some scenarios.

Section 4.1 Maritime SAR Assistance Policy (MSAP) http://uscgaux1201.org/documents/files/MSAP_2E.pdf

Don't you have some responsibilities in this case? If you see someone drowning with no one else but you, you are expected to theow at least a life vest

I don't see much difference here, they have the gps data and are the closest people available. IMO it is their responsibility at that point. Imo the coast guard's "order" would be only a reminder of that responsibility?

Because if you tell some boating noob, they might not proceed carefully enough to see a victim or they might multiply the number of victims by making careless mistakes trying to be heroes.

It does seem a bit at odds with my experience monitoring VHF 16 while sailing. When someone is in distress or there is a report of an unmanned kayak (extremely common!), the Coast Guard will almost always put out a call for any mariners in the vicinity to check it out, report back, and provide aid.

Great story, but honestly Garmin is not any better than most other major brands. They buy out their competition, that's their "greatness". Navionics is a better chart plotter (which they bought up) and some of the best features (active captain) where community sourced info they also bought up.

'Jack, a math major at the Naval Academy, has run the numbers again and again, and it just doesn’t make sense. “At some points I think we were within even half a mile of him,” Andrew said, “but it wasn’t until the end that we came onto him.'

Come on man ... you quit looking once you found him - that's why it's called 'the end' - no special math required.

"The end" could also be the point where they call it quits regardless of if they found him.

Isn't it weird how things are always in the last place you look?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3NTtagBmKY

the actual saying is "last place you think to look" or "last place you expect" (because it's so obvious / uninteresting). but that doesnt make a joke.

You can fix this by continuing to look after you’ve found something. “Phew, glad my keys were in the first place I looked, and not the next ten”

Just in case you find any extra keys to unlock those bonus rooms, it's just good completionist practice.

The Fallout 3 "I'm going to find every last tin can in this creepy abandoned building" method.

It’s important not to end the experiment prematurely in order to obtain a proper set of data. Otherwise we end up with conclusions like, “it’s always in the last place you look.”

You never know, there could be more keys. Confirmation bias is a powerful thing.

I always do my searches in constant time, to foil timing attacks.

I like to start with a failing unit test by deliberately looking for the keys somewhere I know they’re not.

It's important you do this to defeat timing based attacks that might try to determine where you usually put your keys based on the time taken to cut short the search.

I find they’re often in the first place you look but that you miss the on the first cursory look.

A lot like getting the USB plug right the first time but not realizing it. Happens every time.

It’s almost always in the Eureka Zone.

https://nevalalee.wordpress.com/2014/04/19/the-eureka-zone/

This is a great story and endorsement of both Garmins’s gear and the people involved. The related article referenced at the end is worthwhile too, not least for their theory about how the board turned, a lot of things went right that day.

How about adding sensors to a boat to detect if any passengers are onboard and cut-off engine if there are none? Could be a combination of weight/proximity/motion etc.

Disclaimer: I know nothing about boat tech.

There's a joke among sailors that more than a half of male's corpses fished out from the sea has their pants zipper open. This man was extremely lucky, but at the same time quite foolish. There are number of ways to relieve oneself without risking one's life. Less of those on a motorboat where you don't have standing rigging, but still.

“To me, that’s divine intervention,” Andrew said.

https://quran.com/17/67

"When you are touched with hardship at sea, you ˹totally˺ forget all ˹the gods˺ you ˹normally˺ invoke, except Him. But when He delivers you ˹safely˺ to shore, you turn away. Humankind is ever ungrateful."

This is such a great quote to describe the human condition.

Tarantino should have used this for Pulp Fiction instead of Ezekiel 25:17. It would have said so much more about the character of Jules.

If ˹He˺ will consider not letting all the grim stuff happen in the first place, I will get cracking on my gratitude project.

I am no boat person at all but would it not make sense to have keys that only allow you to drive the boat if you are close by like in modern cars? And when you fall off, it just stops a few meters away from you. I know these small boats are probably more simple and the transponders would need to be water proof, etc. but the benefit could be huge.

They have wireless lanyards to do just that. But, currents and wind pressure are just as likely to push the boat away from you faster than you can swim if you're overboard.

Could be a good idea for small boats in some cases. Jet skis do tend to have kill switch tethers.

Boats small enough to be operated by a single person are required by law (I believe) to be fitted with a kill switch that is supposed to be clipped onto the operator. In the event they go overboard, the engine shuts off.

Of course in practice almost nobody actually uses these.

> Of course in practice almost nobody actually uses these.

The damn government can’t tell me what to do.

Sigh, I see plenty of people driving with the seatbelt behind them, which means they make the choice to ignore the advice. Imagine having to take action without being constantly told to.

As other comments have mentioned, we’re dumb.

Some deliberately do it out of principle, despite knowing it's dumb. I have a family member who refuses to wear his seat belt simply because the government shouldn't tell him what to do. He knows it's safer, and knows that he'll get a ticket if he's pulled over, but won't do it, purely out of this weird, dogmatic anti-authority.

In the field of aviation, they study aeronautical decision making (ADM), and hazardous attitudes that prevent good decision making. The FAA identified the so-called 5 Hazardous Attitudes[1], and number one on the list is "Anti-authority". I wouldn't be surprised if this attitude is causal of accidents and negligence in other activities like boating and driving.

1: https://www.aopa.org/news-and-media/all-news/1999/september/...

Given how the country was essentially founded by "anti-authority" and still somewhat values freedom highly, it's not so surprising. IMHO it's not a bad thing as long as it's done in moderation.

>... plenty of people driving with the seatbelt behind them ...

There is a gadget which had some diffusion here (the manufacturer explicitly states that it is not tested/approved and actually prohibited for human use, but we all know how it is used in real life), tellingly called "Zitto" (would translate to "shut-up"):

https://www.lampa.it/it/articoli/72397-zitto-2-extension?gr=...

That's basically useless if there's any significant wind.

You won't be able to catch up to a drifting boat and board it (the latter is quite a challenge in itself).

edit: just not go alone.

Say what you will…

Since I knew it was coming from garmin, I knew the mess I was getting in.

Regardless of the mindless hype, the story is compelling as a short story.

Everyone once in a while it’s nice to read a mindless self promotional piece in which humanity is on display. Sure beats a personal insurance plan from some science denier quarterback?

I didn't notice the domain, it made me check my address bar when I got to the end of the sentence:

> The boat had a Garmin GPS marine system, and while Andrew said he hadn’t been familiar with Garmin units prior to that, it was easy to use, allowing him to figure it out quickly.

The takeaway here is not “Divine intervention” it's either: A lot of people fall off boats and die while taking a leak, or there are so many people on the ocean, that if you go in a straight line, you're probably going to meet someone.

That’s not the takeaway if either of those things are true. I’m not sure there’s much evidence supporting either of those statements. The ocean is huge.

I’m not a religious person so I’d say this is a happy coincidence. And coincidences involving rescues make great stories.

> The story was simple, really, and one that could happen to almost any boater on any given day. Sascha had gone to the side to relieve himself and simply fell overboard.

Almost any boater!

Summary of the story:

Garmin to the rescue: Buy Garmin, and if ever you fall overboard, Garmin’s intuitive touchscreen interface will ensure that someone will find you.

Buy Garmin, save your life !

> had the Garmin technology been less intuitive for an unfamiliar boater in a stressful situation — this story could’ve ended so much differently.

Absolutely shameless…

Isn’t this what we want marketing to be? Informative, empirical and helpful?

Not sure it's a very ethical to do marketing based on someone's close-encounter.

The young rescuer, Jack, is a Math major at the Naval Academy!

When describing how the boat owner fell off his boat, the author said it could’ve happened to anyone, but it sounds like he was peeing off the side of his boat while the engine was running.

I don’t know, but that sounds pretty dumb to me.

It’s one of the leading causes of death in boating.

The leading causes of death in general aviation are the weather and running out of fuel.

Humans are pretty dumb.

It's a not unheard of cause of death in the Grand Canyon as well. Someone gets up to take a pee at night (you're supposed to pee in the river), maybe they're a bit drunk, and they fall in and get swept downriver.

They fall from the grand canyon into the river? that's a gigantic fall

On river trips when camping at night.

Though people have also died pretending to fall from the rim and then they actually do. (You don't normally fall all the way--the walls aren't that shear--but you fall far enough.)

Anyone who travelled on old Indian railway can tell you one hand to hold the rod and other to hold a rod.

…And everyone does dumb things once in a while.

Being alone, not being at the controls while you're driving, dangling near the edge, not wearing a life jacket.

Just not doing one of those things would have prevented or drastically improved things.

He was even a lifeguard and served in the coast guard. It's easy to get complacent!

What a great ad campaign by garmin!

The takeaway here is not “Divine intervention” but: A lot of people fall off boats and die while taking a leak.

tight writing, Garmin.com!

Is the author from the UK? "Pile of weed" sounds like marijuana. I would say "pile of weeds". Like "some weed" vs "some weeds". Plus https://www.wordhippo.com/what-is/another-word-for/relieve_o...

They sure garmined this with their garmins! Makes me wonder if I should be garmining too. I might miss a garmin if I don't.

Is it just me or is the title extremely confusing? Why do writers do this?

I understood it first time. What was confusing to you?

Ghost Boat - Either the craft didn't exist or it has no pilot

With Garmin GPS - okay, it's the no pilot case

Leads - Okay, they followed it to a waypoint or they discovered it motoring aimlessly

Father-Son Duo - these two were the rescuers, cool

To Man overboard - okay, pilot fell off the boat

Definitely clear to me on first read and enough for me to click through.

as a non-native English speaker, it initially read as (something boat) causes (father/son) to (go overboard)

I'm not a native speaker either and I think what threw me off was the "Man Overboard" bit, which is usually used as a "maritime call" so to speak. So in other words, it wasn't clear to me who was overboard, the father-son duo or somebody else. What I think the title should have been is "Ghost Boat with Garmin GPS Leads Father-Son Duo to a Man Overboard", notice "a man overboard" to clearly indicate that they were led to someone who was overboard.

It’s not your fault: the title is very confusing to me and my mother tongue is English. Perhaps finding it confusing is a sign that your English is very good.

Fair enough. I can see how you could have reached that conclusion. I suppose it's written for a native speaker.

For what it's worth, ChatGPT "comprehends" it correctly so perhaps one day we can have a headline auto-expander.

I'm a native english speaker but don't really have a marine background. I also read it as the father/son somehow going overboard.

Made perfect sense to me, but I think if I didn't already know "Man-overboard" as a single term made up of two words, I might've assumed "overboard" modified something else like "leads" or "duo", and then it would've been quite confusing.

For me it's kinda like those visual illusions that look like a dog or a duck but never both. When I first saw this title I was like "the heck is that word salad?" but now after reading the article I can toggle it from making sense to not making sense. Duck to dog and back again.

Postulating as to why writers do this generally - Imagine you work in Garmin PR and you've been looking at this story, thinking about this story, sending and receiving emails about this story, having meetings about this story, etc, for way too long. It suffuses into the tissue of your brain. The title now makes perfect sense to you and you're so entrenched that you can't see it that other way.

Finally, it's Friday. 4pm. Before a long weekend. You're going on an amazing trip to the mountains and you're excited to not think about marine GPS systems for ~72 hours. You've got the post scheduled. Anton, your coworker, pings you and says "hey, should we set up some time to talk about potentially reworking this title? I showed the piece to a friend and they didn't 'get' the title." You sigh, but dutifully pull up Anton's calendar and start scrolling, only to realize he's taking all of next week off and the week after you're going to a conference to extoll the virtues of marine GPS systems and the week after that he's going to a conference to extoll the virtues of marine GPS systems and you're just tired of all this, so you click the 'thumbs up' emoji, close your laptop, and the whole thing just vanishes from everyone's mind. It's the weekend, baby!

It's written by the Garmin PR team - their headlines are as intuitive as their device UIs!

This article is much better: https://www.readersdigest.co.uk/inspire/life/how-a-fisherman...

Nice story but after the whole hacking thing and my own experiences with their acquisition of delorme I’d steer clear of Garmin if possible.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23926289

https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/4/21353842/garmin-ransomware...

Do you plan on avoiding airlines your entire life? Cause Garmin makes some of the most important avionics.

That’s not exactly consumer level gear though is it, my in reach is not subject to FAA regulations

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