Sailing Mag this month had an interesting editorial on what is being called "Yuppie 911" seems the electronic revolution is reaching it's inevitable conclusion. Since GPS became common place a lot of folks have been getting themselves into situations (on both land and sea) beyond their skill level. Now with SPOT they have carried it a step further.

A California Sheriff coined the phrase "Yuppie 911" because his rescue crews are constantly being called out for situations that in the past would not have occured. The editorial spoke of three emergency calls from the same party in the Grand Canyon that required a helicopter response to each one, one of the parties emergencies was the water "tasted salty" on the third call the offending party was forced onto the helicopter for a ride out!

So as mentioned above where do we stop with the technology? I agree with the editor of Sailing that we all have a responibility to reach and maintain a skill level for our choosen activity that will keep us from needlessly endangering those who will respond when we are really in trouble.

I've thought about the SPOT, SSB, SAT PHONE and other methods of contact and usually come to the same conclusion. They are great when they work, cause a lot of worry on both my part and those I was in contact with when they don't and so we tell folks we'll contact you if we can but don't count on it. On a passage we have one reporting party with instructions if they don't hear from us by a certain date to call the CG, we usually have such a large margin of error in our date that if we were really in trouble and our EPIRB didn't work we'd have a good week or more in the liferaft before anyone started looking, and while this has worked well there have been a couple of times when we were scrambling to contact our reporting party because we couldn't find a working phone. With the advent of SatPhone that worry is a bit less but can still fail. We tell all who might be concerned to contact the reporting party so we don't have a dozen brothers, sisters, moms and dads, aunts and uncles all calling the coast guard.

All in all I guess we all have to use the system that gives us the most comfort, I just hope that those who use the technology do so responsibly or else we'll end up paying for rescue as now happens in a few states because the locals got tired of spending money to answer calls for help that were really calls for pizza delivery.