99025 My Experience of GMDSS

My Eperience of GMDSS
Report No. 99025

Last trip I responded to three undesignated distress calls at night. The first was along the Brazilian Coast and was received on DSC HF in a position 40 miles away from us. Shortly before reaching the position, I managed to communicate with the vessel and was advised that the ship was safe and that the signal was sent by mistake. A similar scenario occurred in the South Atlantic. The third instance was in the Mediterranean in an area of dense traffic. The initial message came via the Coast Station from an unknown MMSI. About five ships acknowledged receipt of this message and gave their position, course and speed, only two vessels altered course. I was the only one who stopped at the distress position and tried to get other ships to help search for possible survival craft in the water. The Coast Station made no effort to co-ordinate a search of any sort. After I reported to them, they called "Silence Fini", assuming a false alert. I estimated that at least fifteen ships could have arrived at the scene before me, many of them passed 3 - 4 miles away and went on satisfied that there was no radar echo near the position. As I approached the scene, I contacted other vessels nearby but none appeared to take matters seriously since there was nothing on the radar screen.

An undesignated distress is as serious as any other, possibly even more so if the ship disappears quickly. The fact that nothing is spotted on the radar does not mean that there is no distress, a yacht could have sunk and survivors might be clinging to a tiny liferaft. The fact that the MMSI did not figure in our, or the Coast Station's, publications, is not relevant. A new vessel or an old one having a recent flag change could have a new MMSI assigned. Coast Stations should have access to a central computer where information is kept up to date.

I feel that the whole system fails when false alerts are so numerous that people stop believing in them. Most of the false alerts are caused by operating mistakes. It is extremely rare for a message to be cancelled by a ship which has generated it in error, this usually only happens after another ship has responded giving an ETA and asking for details of the distress. Neither the ships nor the Coast Stations appear to be ready for GMDSS which has already been implemented Crash courses were given to ships' officers, a lot of whom are suffering from fatigue and are often more pre-occupied by paper work. Frequent alarms disrupt their concentration and ability to maintain the solo lookout and other duties which are imposed upon them. In some countries, Coast Stations seem to be unprepared and ignorant of the requirements.

Some DSC sets have a memory storage capacity of only 20 messages, at times this storage capacity can be exhausted in less than an hour, or even in minutes, by irrelevant messages and false alerts. If the printer is "off line" for some reason, a real distress in the vicinity might not be noticed, particularly if the OOW is busy with navigational tasks. The design of many DSC sets is poor, money being saved by having a poor interface, minimum keys and a ridiculously small screen. It is nowadays very rare to spend a watch at sea without receiving an alert, 99.9% of the time these are irrelevant or false.

The types of irrelevant message are:

Ø Different Ocean (i.e a message from the Pacific when you are in the Atlantic).

Ø Position Inland (I.e. from a nautical school in a developing country, or someone in the Gobi desert).

Ø Error Position 999999

Such errors are even acknowledged or relayed around the World by other vessels. This leaves me feeling very concerned about the attitude and knowledge of officers on certain ships. If an error is made, the minimum requirement should be to admit it and immediately send a cancellation to the RCC. Some ships appear to acknowledge messages regardless of their position and before giving the Coast Station a chance to do so. This is not only disruptive in that it could cause collision risks by affecting the watchkeeper's concentration, it also compromises the safety of other seafarers because a real distress might just be ignored or not noticed. It is high time that ships who unnecessarily clutter the system are penalised. The system has not been properly designed and many officers are not properly trained.

I fear that similar problems will be faced on the introduction of AIS unless we take proper steps beforehand to adequately train and brief ship's officers about the system.