The Mayday call came over the VHF-FM marine radio at 4:20 p.m. on a bright, sunny day: an explosion aboard a large motor yacht identified as
Blind Date had left her sinking rapidly 17.5 miles east of Sandy Hook, NJ. Three people were dead and nine injured, and half the 40 crewmembers and passengers already had abandoned ship.
“I’m in three feet of water on the bridge,” the man who transmitted the call told the Coast Guard. “I’m going to stay by the radio as long as I can before I have to go overboard.”
Within minutes, the Coast Guard command center in New York launched an intense search-and-rescue operation. The effort, which covered 638 square miles, involved two boat crews and seven helicopters and fixed-wing search planes, along with some 200 local-area emergency responders who set up mass casualty reception areas ashore.
After five hours, however, the search turned up nothing, and the Coast Guard determined it had been a hoax. The scam cost U.S. taxpayers $318,000, put dozens of Coast Guard crewmembers at risk, and tied up rescue boats and aircraft that would have been needed had a real emergency occurred elsewhere. The hoaxter never was found.
The
Blind Date case was hardly the only hoax distress call with which maritime agencies have had to contend. Despite a continuous campaign to discourage people from making false calls, the Coast Guard still receives some 175 suspected hoax calls a year. Some 20 of these each year are confirmed and ultimately prosecuted in court.
Since 2003, the service has recorded 1215 suspected hoax calls and another 184 that actually have been confirmed as hoaxes. It also has received some 15,000 false alerts, distress calls made in good faith that later prove mistaken, as when a boat reported as missing turns up safely later. In a real hoax, the perpetrator intends to deceive authorities.
Although the hoax totals are a scant portion of the 25,000 or so Mayday calls that the Coast Guard handles each year, they’re costly. Officials estimate it takes between $600 and $1200 an hour to send a small boat on a rescue mission; $6000 to $9000 an hour for a helicopter; $12,451 for a C-130 search plane; and $14,000 for a small cutter.
But the money isn’t what concerns authorities the most, says Lieutenant Erin Slycord, chief
of the Coast Guard command center at Sector Baltimore, which oversees search-and-rescue efforts for the Chesapeake Bay area. Diverting boats, aircraft, and crews bottles up assets that otherwise would be available to help mariners who are in trouble. “What may seem like a benign prank could ultimately end up costing someone his or her life,” Lieutenant Slycord says.
Knowingly making a false distress call is illegal. Federal law classifies it as a felony, with possible penalties of five to 10 years in prison, up to $250,000 in criminal fines, and as much as $5000 in civil fines. The court also may require the perpetrator to reimburse the Coast Guard for the cost of its response — at the per-hour prices cited.
Authorities say there’s no single reason that perpetrators make false distress calls. Some, quite possibly like the person who radioed in the Mayday call about the Blind Date, get a perverse kick out of the show that the rescue effort stirs up, complete with flashing red and blue lights, sirens, and hyper-tense coverage on local TV channels.
Other hoax calls are made by boaters who have had too much to drink and regard them as a clever way to get attention. Occasionally, they come from unsupervised kids who end up playing around on a VHF-FM marine radio, sometimes from a recreational boat that’s located on a trailer in their parents’ backyard.
One problem is that hoax calls often are difficult to differentiate from genuine ones. By law and tradition, the Coast Guard regards all Mayday calls as serious, and will stick with the rescue effort for hours or days until it has good reason to doubt that the emergency is genuine.
New technology is helping to reduce the number of hoax calls. The Coast Guard’s new high-tech Rescue 21 communications system enables watchstanders to pinpoint where a radio call is coming from. Also, new automatic identification systems (AIS) track and identify some vessels. So does digital selective calling (DSC) on marine radios.
But Rescue 21 isn’t always able to plot the source of a radio call on smaller bodies of water such as Chesapeake Bay. Most of the vessels that carry AIS equipment are large ships, not recreational boats. And DSC is used primarily to send emergency distress signals, not standard voice transmissions.
Indeed, hoax calls still are a frequent phenomenon in this area. Sector Baltimore is currently investigating some 15 distress calls that it suspects may be hoaxes, including a string of calls made last fall by a lone man, identified when his voice was recognized by acquaintances after investigators asked local TV channels to play audio tapes of his calls.
Coast Guard officials in Baltimore have set up a 24-hour hotline — at (410) 576-2696 — for Chesapeake Bay mariners to report suspected hoaxes or other dangerous activities they see on the water. And federal prosecutors have moved more aggressively in recent years to take such cases to trial.
In June, for example, a Gloucester, VA, woman was convicted of calling in a false report about a ship that supposedly was taking on water in a nearby river. The hoax sparked a two-hour search that cost the Coast Guard more than $82,000. The woman admitted to the charges.
In Atlantic Beach, NC, a 27-year-old man pleaded guilty to making a false report in which he said he was abandoning his sinking boat near Cape Lookout and Shackleford Banks. The Mayday call prompted a search-and-rescue operation involving the Coast Guard, Marine Corps, and National Park Service — and hours of wasted time.
In March 2012, a 19-year-old airplane pilot in Ohio intentionally filed a false report describing a 25-foot fishing vessel in trouble on Lake Erie, spawning a 21-hour joint U.S.-Canadian search-and-rescue effort that tied up four vessels and two aircraft. He was sentenced to three months in prison and ordered to pay $489,000 in reimbursements. No joke.
About the Author: Art Pine is a USCG-licensed captain and a longtime Chesapeake Bay powerboater and sailor.