Capt. Bligh Reenactment

[mintyspilot]

Originally Posted by justwaiting

Please make your arguments baised on facts. Most rescue and emergency server personal in this country do not get paid.

Coastguard staff work for free in Oz? That's nice of them. Here in the UK we have to pay ours whether they sit indoors or go out on the salty.

Originally Posted by justwaiting

Often rescuse are carried out by non emergency personal

Yeah, we have them too - RNLI mostly - and they volunteer so the cost to the taxpayer is the same whether they sit indoors or go to sea. RNLI are funded by charitable donation. I always contribute to them as I think they provide a very valuable service.

Originally Posted by justwaiting

...and none of them ask people to take risks to give them a purpose in life.

No, but when you volunteer for S&R, or do it as a job, you know what it entails and you know the dangers.

[Hirophant]

I don't think this has been mentioned but Don and co kept a blog with the daily exploits of their voyage, Voyage of the Bounty Boat

I don't think the boat had any special buoyancy aids, this was an open boat that was supposed to be a replica of the original (except slightly smaller). Ration quantities and navigation aids etc were the same - ie. not enough food and water and little more than a sextant. However they did have an emergency navstation which could be fired up to show a local chart if they thought their lives were in danger, and they did use this at least once, e.g when sighting breaking waves ahead in the dark told them they were heading for some reefs of unknown extent.

Doing the whole thing on an open boat with not enough food or water struck me as pretty crazy, more so than these solo circumnavigations, however the region they were passing through is not very remote so I guess rescue wouldn't have been too far away if they had come a cropper. Note that Mike Perham was originally going to be on this voyage but ended up becoming Jessica Watson's boyfriend instead, as you can imagine her was pretty gutted....

One of the bizarrest things I thought was that Don spent ages trying to hand pick and train up an exceptionally reslient crew for what he knew would be a very demanding and dangerous voyage, but so many candidates dropped out after gettig cold feet (or in Perham's case being too ill) that he ended up simply picking his crew about a week before departure, one of whom was an 18 year old British student with no sailing experience whatsoever! I thought Abby Sunderland's voyage was a rush job but this takes the ship's biscuit!