A MAYDAY for a Hydraulic Pump, a Real Medical Emergency on the Same Channel
You are the licensed operator at a small public coast station serving a working harbour. At 1128 a vessel hails your working channel: 'MAYDAY, MAYDAY, MAYDAY, [station], this is the fishing vessel North Star, we need immediate assistance.' You answer, and the skipper explains that the hydraulic steering pump seized, the boat is anchored in light winds two miles off the breakwater with four people aboard, nobody is hurt, and a mechanic has ordered a replacement part that should arrive on the 1400 tide. The skipper wants you to 'put out a call' for the part, asks you to telephone three marine suppliers to speed things up, and asks whether he should keep repeating MAYDAY until someone comes. While you are still speaking, the tug Harbor King transmits on the same channel that a crewmember is unconscious with chest pain and breathing badly, and asks for a doctor.
1. Is North Star in distress? What do you tell the skipper about the signal he has used, and why does it matter?
Read the worked answer
No. Distress means grave and imminent danger requiring immediate assistance. North Star has a steering failure, but she is anchored in light winds, two miles off a breakwater, with four uninjured people aboard, and a mechanic already has a plan tied to the 1400 tide. That is a vessel needing a repair, not a vessel in peril.
Tell the skipper plainly: stop transmitting MAYDAY, do not repeat it, and do not send another one. Explain the reason rather than just quoting rules - MAYDAY clears the channel of every other station, triggers a search-and-rescue response that may launch boats and aircraft, and puts other people at risk in order to help someone who does not need saving. Knowingly transmitting a false distress signal is a serious offence, and it attaches to the skipper, his vessel and his station licence, not just to the moment.
If the situation could genuinely deteriorate into danger to life - weather building, dragging toward a lee shore, water coming in - the correct signal is PAN PAN, urgency, which asks for help without declaring that life is in immediate danger. Otherwise his request belongs on a working channel as routine public correspondence.
Keep him on the channel for the moment, but make clear that he yields instantly if higher-priority traffic arrives - which it is about to.
2. How should the Harbor King's situation be classified and handled, and what do you do with North Star while it is running?
Read the worked answer
Unconscious with chest pain and laboured breathing is a medical emergency in which life may be lost within minutes. That is grave and imminent danger: it is a MAYDAY, and the tug should be told to use the distress signal if it can, or the coast station handles it as distress traffic regardless of what prefix the tug used.
Practical handling:
- Impose silence on the channel - 'Silence MAYDAY' - and tell North Star to stand by and not transmit until released.
- Get the essentials fast: position, number of persons aboard, whether the casualty is breathing, whether the tug can reach a dock or needs a boat, a helicopter or an ambulance at the quay.
- Telephone the Coast Guard duty officer or RCC immediately. They control the SAR and medical response; your job is to get the information to them, not to run the rescue from the microphone.
- Arrange medical advice by the route your station's procedures provide (radio-medical advice or the harbour's emergency medical service), simultaneously with the RCC call if you have the hands for it.
- Give first-aid guidance only if you are trained and authorised; otherwise keep the channel clear and let the professionals speak.
- Log the times of the call, the silence, the telephone calls and the handover.
North Star stays on stand-by, silent, until Harbor King's traffic is closed out. Only then do you return to the parts problem, and then as ordinary public correspondence.
3. What are the charging, logging and reporting consequences of the two calls?
Read the worked answer
Charging: the Harbor King's medical emergency is distress traffic and is handled free of charge - no tariff, no billing entry. North Star's calls to the suppliers, once the skipper has stopped using MAYDAY and the traffic has been reclassified as routine public correspondence, are ordinary chargeable calls at your published rates. Opening with a distress signal does not make a commercial parts call free, and offering to help with suppliers does not make it distress traffic.
Logging: both events, in time order - the wording of North Star's initial MAYDAY, the advice you gave and the time he stopped transmitting, the Harbor King's call and reclassification, the silence imposed, the telephone calls to the RCC and medical services, and the times each channel was released. If your station records the working channel, preserve the recording.
Reporting: report the misuse of the distress signal to the Coast Guard or the licensing authority. This is not pettiness - a misused MAYDAY degrades the response to real emergencies and may be a prosecutable false distress signal. Your log and any recording are the evidence, which is another reason to write them up while the times are still fresh. Finally, consider whether anything your own station transmitted could have encouraged the skipper to think a MAYDAY was the way to reach you.