Lost & Found
Does it make sense to use smartphones and tablets for a man overboard alarm and recovery system? I can testify that the first reaction of Sail magazine’s Pittman Innovation Award judges was skepticism. Nonetheless we found PanPan’s CrewWatcher (crew watcher.com) so well thought out and potentially so useful that we gave it an award in the safety category, and then an independent second set of judges picked it for the Overall Winner. And truth be told, the finished CrewWatcher personal beacons (and, while we’re at it, apps) don’t actually exist yet!
“Everyone’s okay”—or to be more specific, “everyone is still on the boat”—is one hell of a nice thing to know when you’re under way, especially in the dark or when it’s rough, or both. In many situations if you don’t learn that a person has gone overboard quite quickly, he or she is going to die, possibly not quickly. I worry about this, even though I’ve yet to experience either side of a person overboard situation. So I not only appreciate the evolution of personal MOB beacons, I particularly like the type that can regularly reassure me that they’re working.
The PanPan CrewWatcher is just such an active MOB system, also termed “alarm on failure” when I tested
