‘No Duff’ call during Search & Rescue Exercise adds to pressure for Coastguard Volunteers
Starting Friday 30th July at 6pm with the report of ‘missing surfers’ a full scale search and rescue exercise was held in Christchurch involving four Coastguard units (Canterbury, Waimakariri-Ashley, Sumner and Canterbury Air Patrol) as well as Police, LandSAR and Surf Lifesaving. “The object of the exercise was to enhance our multi agency coordination and provide our people with the opportunity to practice their incident management skills” says Mark Whitehouse, Southern Region Operations Manager. Mark said that in order to create a similar sense of urgency and pressure for the volunteers involved the exercise included multiple scenarios. For example while still searching for two missing surfers on the Friday night a ‘Pan Pan’ call was received from a boat in distress, but only the boats VHF radio number was heard. A ‘Pan Pan’ is a distress call indicating a vessel has a very urgent message regarding safety to a boat or person. The three Coastguard vessels involved were out searching until 10.30pm that night and found all the targets.
Saturday morning at 7am another call for a missing surfer, 9am a report of missing school children on Quail Island and 9.30am a call relating to a crashed Hang Glider on cliffs outside Lyttelton Harbour. And in the middle of this Coastguard Canterbury received a ‘No Duff’ call for assistance from a pleasure boat that had broken down in Lyttelton Harbour. During the exercise radio messages were generally started with the message ‘SAREX SAREX’ to identify then, however when Coastguard receives a genuine call during an exercise to make sure everyone knows this is not part of the exercise the radio messages start with ‘No Duff, No Duff’.
“We’re really pleased with how our professional volunteers performed during the search and rescue exercise” says Mark, “its shown us again our strengths in operational activities and allowed us to identify areas in the management of operations that we need to put time into training on”.
Over 120 people participated in the exercise including Sea Cadets, members of the Canterbury Outboard Boat Club as well as Coastguard, Surf Lifesaving, LandSAR and Police.
