On a lovely mid October early morning we found ourselves at Lymington quay waiting to board the boat we had chartered for the day.  It was a still and sunny morning, although the shipping forecast was for gale force 8 later on; we were hoping for something in between as the main purpose of the day was to put our new beacons (the SafeLink R10 Survivor Recovery System plus the McMurdo SmartFind S10 Personal AIS Beacon) through their paces in rough weather.

As it was, by the time we had arrived in Christchurch Bay the wind was blowing force 6-7 and there was some choppy water, just what we were hoping for! With the strength of the wind forecast to increase to gale force 8 there were practically no other boats around.  We stopped somewhere off Milford-on-Sea to start the exercise; having mounted the R10 on a lifejacket tethered to a Dan buoy we motored four miles away. There was a swell of about 1 metre and very quickly we lost site of the bright yellow life jacket, even the Dan buoy disappeared from view quite quickly; however the activated R10 immediately showed up on our AIS enabled chart plotter.  As we got further and further away, south of the Needles, the swell grew, but the R10 continued to show up. This really brought home to us the real value of this product. 

In a real life situation locating a man overboard from four miles away would have been extremely difficult in these conditions, the life jacket would not have been visible until we were pretty much right on top of the crewman; however, with the R10 activated we were able to motor directly back to the lifejacket, which due to the strength of the flooding tide had drifted a long way from its initial activation point. The plotter was able to show not only the initial activation point but also the drift and current location of the R10. We picked up the beacons just before they headed into the Solent past Hurst Castle.

We then went to calmer waters just off Keyhaven, sheltered by Hurst Spit from the worst of the waves, where the R10 was put through its paces on a number of automatic and manually inflated life jackets.  Our willing ‘victim’ certainly got his exercise jumping into the Solent numerous times, but being in a dry suit was generally not affected by the temperature of the water. Each time the life jacket inflation was followed by the reassuring beep of the R10 activating.

Finally as the afternoon drew to a close we arrived back in Lymington; just enough time to do some ‘how to’ videos with the marina as a backdrop before heading off. All in all a very successful day.