Hey Tom,

You seem to be reading an awful lot into such statistics, which lumps in Police and Ambulance Services, and rescues of hikers in the Scottish Highlands and evacuations of workers from North Sea oil rigs, in with maritime rescues. Coast Guard "callouts" represent only about a third of those numbers, and as far as I can tell, seem to have remained fairly steady...

Perhaps it's just me, but when I'm talking about this subject, I'm referring to the number and rate of Recreational Sailing Yachts Being Lost/Abandoned Offshore... Until someone can come up with the 'data' that applies to that particular subset, I'm sticking with my gut instinct based on the more 'anecdotal' evidence that the rate of sailing yachts being lost offshore in recent years is most certainly not on the decline... (grin)

Coming up with such specifically targeted data would take a great deal of research on someone's part, probably even invoking the use of the Freedom of Information Act to obtain info from the CG... But as I've said earlier, the News Feed archives over on Sailnet include over 15,000 entries of every conceivable 'incident' involving sailing vessels going back to 2006. Anyone is free to begin wading through all that, in their effort to show that there was a greater number of losses of yachts offshore in past years, than we have seen more recently over the past two...

best regards,

Jon