The importance of Skippers being conscious of the uses of the emergency channel 16 was underlined this week when two careless yachties put hundreds of ships sailing down the busiest shipping lane in the world at risk by wrongly broadcasting on the international distress frequency for an hour.

Five coastguard stations on both sides of the English Channel and hundreds of ships were prevented from using the VHF Channel 16, the international distress frequency, when the two-crew English yacht held a private conversation on the radio channel for more than hour.

Brixham and Portland coastguards in Dorset had to scramble a rescue helicopter to attract the yacht's attention and force it off Channel 16 - an operation which cost thousands of pounds.

A spokesman for Brixham Coastguard said the incident could have had dramatic consequences as coastguards and passing vessels were effectively mute and deaf for more than 60 minutes.

He said: 'Channel 16 is the international distress frequency. On Sunday night virtually every ship in the mid Channel was affected by this incident. If you interfere with Channel 16, many lives are potentially at risk.

'Valuable resources which could have been used elsewhere had to be wasted on this incident.'

The incident happened at 8.30pm on Sunday evening in Lyme Bay and lasted an hour. The signal was jamming all emergency communications in mid-Channel and affected the ability of Portland, Brixham and Solent coastguards and CROSS Jobourg in France and Guernsey Coastguard to handle emergency traffic.

After an hour of jamming and several attempts to contact the vessel, Portland Coastguard scrambled the Coastguard helicopter 106 to find the yacht, using its on-board direction finding equipment. The helicopter circled the yacht to attract the skipper's attention and was eventually able to make contact to stop him broadcasting on Channel 16.

Nic Lonsdale, watch officer at Portland Coastguard, said shortly after the incident was resolved, another ship started broadcasting a Mayday signal.

Mr Lonsdale said: 'It is not only irritating to have the Maritime Distress Channel blocked by what the yacht crew thought was a private conversation but a danger to all other vessels.

'Eventually we were forced to deploy a helicopter to silence the transmissions. Shortly afterwards a different vessel broadcast a Mayday which would not have been heard had the yacht still been transmitting.'

A spokeswoman for the Maritime Coastguard Agency (MCA), said: 'We don't think these people were being malicious. They were just oblivious to the fact that they were broadcasting their personal conversation to everyone on the emergency channel.'

The MCA spokeswoman said details of the incident had been passed to the Maritime and Coastguard Agency Enforcement Branch.

by Western Morning News

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