Oh, boy. Don’t get me started…..
Here is a story that might bite the USCG boys in NYC right in the transom. Gee, having some press tag along to promote these brand new (yawn… same twin jet technology I’ve been driving for 8 years) $2 million boats seemed like such a good idea. Yeah, give the taxpayers an idea of where all their money is going. Too bad they couldn’t find a real emergency for the reporters, so a boat out of gas had to be the “distress” call for this story.
Ok, yeah, the boat was disabled in a “busy channel”…. oh dear! What an emergency! Ok, fine, then pull them out of harms way and call a MARB, per the MSAP policy, and turn the case over to a commercial assistance company, like us, who has been using jet drive technology for a decade.
What’s that you say? Oh, handing off a non-distress case to a commercial tower just doesn’t sound like the kind of publicity that Sector New York had in mind when they agreed to allow the press ride along (are we calling it embedding now?).
Yeah, but now there is this press story documenting that some Coasties in NYC are acting like cowboys again and doing non-emergency jobs in direct opposition to the written MSAP policy. I believe that a vessel that is simply out of gas would be considered “non-distress”, especially if there is a $2mm USCG boat standing by next to them.
Treat As Non-Distress If Appropriate. If the Coast Guard responds to a request for assistance and determines, once on scene, that there is no emergency, the case will be handled as a non-distress, following the procedures outlined below. MSAP 4.1.6.2 (d)
….don’t get me started.
http://wcbstv.com/local/us.coast.guard.2.1725184.html
