For a while now Coastguard and other organisations such as Maritime New Zealand and Water Safety New Zealand have been encouraging boaties to make greater use of the VHF radio network. While cellphones are an everyday item, they do have their limitations when out on the water.

While coverage has been getting better, cell phones are extremely vulnerable, especially in a marine environment. If you drop them in the water they are useless and most importantly, if you need to make an emergency call and your battery is nearly dead you may only be able to talk to one person. Imagine if they are not there when you ring?

Contrast that with a marine VHF radio. They are especially designed for the marine environment. When you make a call on the VHF radio it is heard not only by Coastguard but also any other boats in the area that have that channel on.

Coastguard is encouraged by the increased amount of people using VHF with the regions statistics showing an increase in the year of over 16%. In January of this year alone, Coastguard Northern Region received over 19,200 calls which is the highest ever received. The vast majority of these are boaties lodging trip reports which say where the boat is going and how many people are on board which is not only good boating practice, but encourages familiarity with operating radios.

Whenever you go boating, you need to make sure that you carry at least two forms of communications. One of which we recommend to be a VHF radio. This means that you are prepared. Obviously if we don’t know where you are, we can’t help you.

We predicted that the past summer was going to be a busy one for Coastguard and it was. Relatively settled conditions has meant that our volunteers did not quite meet last summers amount of incidents but we have set new records in the amount of incidents that we have attended in a day. All of the crews of our Rescue Vessels and all of the crews for our air patrols are volunteers. The majority of the people who man our operations room are also volunteers. Thank you to all of them who have provided such a great level of service.

Finally, Coastguard appreciates the support that it receives from its members. More people than ever are recognising the benefit and piece of mind of being a member of Coastguard and we do appreciate that.

Safe Boating

Jody L Foster

President

Coastguard Northern Region Inc.