03.05.2023 Santa Maria di Leuca, Italy
Graptolite's Sailing Log
Martyn Pickup & Heike Richter
Wed 3 May 2023 15:30
There was no way to continue over the Bay of Taranto to meet Dawn and Adam in Catania. The weather was far too nasty. We spent the day bouncing on the mooring and doing some work on the boat. One of the jobs was fitting some personal AIS beacons to our lifejackets. These are emergency Man Overboard beacons that are set off when a lifejacket inflates. They send a digital alert to the VHF radio on the boat, get a GPS fix and transmit the location to suitably equipped boats so that the Man Overboard can be located. As these beacons, radio and chartplotters are all new we tested them carefully according to the manual. The radio test is only supposed to go our own radio, like a phone call, and the AIS test should say "MOB Test". Twenty minutes later we were suprised to have the Italian Coastguard knocking on the boat and wanting to know if it was us sending distress messages. We have yet to find out what happened.