MOBilert – help in the worst kind of MOB

by Helen Hopcroft on 27 Dec 2006 During the offshore racing season, sailors and their families think about Man Over Board scenarios. Any MOB is bad, but some are worse than others.

Mobilert – MOBi-lert is a crew monitoring system designed to assist a quick rescue in the event of an unobserved man overboard scenario.

This is my worst nightmare – ‘I wake up in the front berth and the boat is dark. I am still groggy from sleep. The fluorescent dial on my watch says that it is 3am. I wonder why my husband didn’t wake me for my watch at midnight.

‘We are about 15 miles off shore on an overnight passage. There is no moon and the sky is black. There’s just the two of us on our 25’ boat. When I went to sleep the wind was blowing 10-15 knots and the sea state was mild. During the hours I have slept the wind has started to howl and the seas climb.

‘I call out to my husband but there’s no answer. Mustn’t have heard me, I think. Not surprising with the wind building and the waves sloshing against the hull. I consider going back to sleep. Despite the uncomfortable ride in the forward berth, the bed is warm and cosy. I roll over and lie there for a few minutes. Then I start to feel guilty and lazy; he might need some help. I get up and climb out into the cockpit.

‘There is no one there. For a second, I think that my husband must be playing a practical joke on me. He’s like that; he likes winding people up. But there’s no where on the boat that you can hide. I can’t believe what I am seeing.

‘He is no longer on the boat. There is nothing but the sound of the wind and the waves. He is somewhere, out there, in the water. And I don’t know how long he’s been there or where he is.’

A version of this nightmare happened to inventor Mark Pallister. But it was a real situation not just a bad dream. And it involved a child going missing, not an adult.

This is what happened. Mark’s young son fell off a boat that was cruising from Sydney to Lady Musgrave Island. The boy was a chronic sleepwalker and he literally walked off the boat.

Luckily he was wearing a PFD. It was nine hours before the boy was recovered by Police Sea Search and Rescue. The trauma of this experience led Mark to develop a device that would alert crew members the moment a person went over the side. It is called MOBi-lert.

MOBi-lert is a crew monitoring system designed to assist a quick rescue in the event of a man overboard scenario. The way it works is simple. A few seconds after a crew member hits the water an automatic alarm sounds. Simultaneously, the position of the vessel is logged via GPS.

Each member of the crew needs to wear a small waterproof transmitter. These are called pendants. This transmitter keeps constant contact with the main MOBi-lert base unit which is located on the boat. The transmitter sends out radio signals at nano second intervals. If something happens to stop these transmissions, the system moves into emergency mode.

MOBi-lert is programmed with your boats dimensions. If your transmitter goes outside this perimeter the system is activated. The alarm will sound and the GPS will record the exact spot the transmitter (with you wearing it) breached the perimeter.

So if your boat’s 10 metres LOA and the transmitter tells the MOBi-lert base unit that you’re 15 metres away from the base unit, there’s obviously a problem. The transmitters can be individually programmed so that the base unit recognises which transmitter belongs to which crew member.

MOBi-lert’s Peter Gedye explains the advantages of the design; ‘It tells you who’s in, where they went in and when they went in… The benefit of this system is that it tells the people on the boat who are in the best position to preform a rescue.’

The system is also activated when the pendant is submerged in water. Submersion prevents radio waves from the transmitter reaching the base unit.

To avoid the problem of an alarm sounding every time a wave breaks in the cockpit, the pendant needs to be submerged for approximately three seconds. If the pendant is submerged for three seconds, the system moves quickly towards an emergency response. A GPS waypoint is recorded. Four seconds later the alarm will sound.

This short delay allows you to enjoy a wet and wild day on the water without an alarm going off every couple of minutes. It gives you a few seconds to disable the emergency response if it is unnecessary.

You can also reduce the volume of the alarm signal. It will keep on beeping quietly to let you know that the MOB alarm has been activated.

There’s also the option of customising the advanced models so that MOBi-lert interacts with the boat’s other safety equipment. So at the point that the MOBi-lert alarm sounds, the auto helm can be programmed to turn head to wind. This is particularly useful for solo sailors. My husband and I have a long running joke about the number of single handers who carry manual deploy dan buoys.

You can also program the system so that when the alarm sounds, the engine cuts out, or a dan buoy or EPIRB is activated.

On a less serious note; you will be pleased to hear that the pendants are available in a really pretty assortment of colours. There’s a pinky red, bright orange, green, white and other fashion colours. Which is just the thing for hard core racing crews. You can have Mr Pink, Mr Black, Mr White etc. Why not really antagonise your foredeck gorilla by giving him the pink pendant?

Bored millionaires please take note. If you’ve got far too much money, why not get onto Mobilarm, the company that makes MOBi-lert and ask them to customize some glitter pink pendants. Perhaps with some kind of decorative stitching detail or an embroidered fluffy lanyards?

For the fashion conscious, the pendants can be worn on a lanyard around the neck, on a belt, or around the wrist. If you’re not into fashion statements, keep it in your pocket.

You know the expression ‘not drowning; waving’? Well with the stylish assortment of pendant colours, you can be ‘not drowning; posing.’

Actually, wearing the pendant on your arm is probably not the best place for it. There are two reasons for this.

If you go over the side, the first thing you do when you hit the water is to start waving your arms about. And cursing your boat, the weather and/or your skipper. Remember that one of the ways this system works is for the pendant to be submerged in water for three seconds.

The other reason is obvious; you do a lot of work with your arms on a boat. Something around your arm may restrict your movement or get caught on lines.

On the advanced MOBi-lert 7200 and 7600 series a screen will immediately display a back track graphic. So you can use this data to backtrack and locate the exact position the crew member went over the side. The 7600 model has an integrated GPS system to pinpoint the MOB location. The other models use the boat’s GPS.

The system can be customised to suit boats up to 100ft LOA. Only one base unit is needed per boat and the advanced series can manage crews of up to 18 people.

The product appears to be catching on. An impressive list of people has invested in the system. Alfa Romeo raced to Hobart with them on board in 2005.

The Volvo 60 Getaway Sailing CMC Markets will be of a number of the 2006 Sydney/Hobart boats that have a MOBi-lert system on board. As will George Shaw in the upcoming 2007 Osaka Cup.

The value of the system has been recognised by the commercial boating world. WA Fisheries decided to put them on its boats after a recent disastrous MOB episode. Worksafe is reportedly very interested in potential commercial applications. The system is standard on all Coast Guard vessels on the west coast.

The company has also won a swag of design awards. Their most recent win was the Sport and Leisure category in the 2006 Australia Design Awards. They were also the first Australian product to receive a Safety at Sea A