this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2024
139 points (96.0% liked)

World News

38471 readers
2300 users here now

A community for discussing events around the World

Rules:

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.


Lemmy World Partners

News [email protected]

Politics [email protected]

World Politics [email protected]


Recommendations

For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I gather that many larger ships often either have malfunctioning AIS or don't have it turned on.

AIS is a system that pings identity and location to other ships, and can set off alarms to warn of impending collisions at sea.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (1 children)

All commercial ships are required to be transmitting on AIS. The article doesn't mention if this couple had AIS (send or receive) at all though. Typically sailors keep watch in shifts to spot potential collisions. By the sounds of it, they had a lot of miles under their belt.

If I had to guess, they had a mechanical failure or a collision with something else that caused them to take on water.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

By the sounds of it, they had a lot of miles under their belt.

You have to wonder how they ended up dead? What happened to the EPIRB? Did they not have a PLB? GPS and Portable Radio?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Boats that size can sink incredibly fast. They may have had 5 minutes to figure out what was going on, try and fail to stop it, grab a few things and deploy a life boat. It's possible one or both of them were asleep. It may have been the middle of the night. There could have been a storm. E.g. The situation may have been very disorienting.

I would guess whatever happened, they ended up bobbing around in a life raft for days with little or no food/water. As a pale redhead I know I would personally die after a couple days of sun exposure alone.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Seems like it could be used as a homing signal for pirates.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

I don't know for sure, but I suspect there aren't many pirates in the middle of the Atlantic.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 month ago

It is, many people will disable it when near known pirate active areas