2006-10-26T11:09:00.000-07:00

We have had a bit of bad publicity recently regarding the losing of a Man Overboard Dummy or Dead Fred as it is known,so just to set the story straight here is our version.
On Sunday 8th October we arranged with Humber Coastguard to undertake a Man Overboard Search exercise while on our routine fortnightly exercise. We deployed our dummy a mile off Hunmanby Gap and passed the position to the coastguard they would enter them into their search computer and pass back to us an area to search in one hours time. The tides at the time were springs and at the top of the tide the worst possible conditions you could encounter in that area.
We continued with our exercise carrying out various drills, then one hour later we were passed the area to search by the coastguard we entered this into our navigation computer (Laser Plotter) and GPS and we conducted search of the area it was expected to be in, nothing was found in the area so we were passed more information and began to search another area.
We then conducted a search of our own accord informing the coastguards of our intentions searching and area of about 1.5 square miles, in this area we had still not located the dummy so the decision was made to abandon the exercise and return to station, as we had carried out what we thought was a comprehensive seach of the area and had come to the conclusion it must have sunk.
The dummy was spotted by a ferry 9 days later off Whitby thinking it was a body the lifeboat was launched to recover it on arriving on scene they discovered it was our MOB dummy, the press have reported it in different ways. I can only say that if they put as much effort into reporting all the good jobs we do in the RNLI then more people would know about the RNLI and it volunteer crews and the jobs they valuable work they do, we rescue 2 kids in a dinghy and we get 3 lines in the paper if we are lucky, lose a bit of training equipment and they all want to know you.
Well despite them having a good old laugh at us we and the coastguards have learned a lot after this exercise to do with seaching and tides in that area.

Conclusions

The tide in that area is far stronger than the coastguard computer and our local knowledge was telling us.

Dont be too complacent thinking you know your area too well it will come back and bite you on the butt.

We searched the area given and worked out by us by the best possible method and covered all options in the time allowed.

Its invaluable to do exercises like this next time it could be a person not a dummy the more knowledge we can gain the better.

We need a better way to measure local tidal flows and rates

P.S we would not have returned to station and left it there had it been a real person we would have stayed there as long as phsyically possible.

fileylifeboat