Other than the compass (which was only visible in the day time) the EPIRB was the only piece of equipment we assumed to work on the aforementioned voyage. We of course didn't test it as we were able to make it back safely, but I should probably learn more about how it functions.
We were sailing like demons. One of my biggest regrets of the trip was that we didn't have any wind or speed instrumentation to let us know how fast we were going, but it felt extremely fast.
They’re very safe, last something like 10 years, and aren’t really expensive (compared to “I need to know what direction I’m going and have no way to do so, or can’t see it”).
There are also lots of established shipping lanes you could find that would be relatively densely traveled and give you periodic feedback for which direction to go. A bit more dangerous due to collisions without lights but as long as your retroreflector is hoisted, big ships should see you clearly on radar. plus you’ll generally be swapping sleep shifts and always have someone manning the helm on the sailboat, though seeing large vessels at night can be somewhat more difficult.
The only other complicating factor was that due to the August Florida heat, nobody really had the luxury of sleep for the first couple of days.
My experience in Marine SAR is that this is no longer true. Apps like Navionics, SeaPilot, etc - often without any backup at all - are by far the most common form of navigation.
There were lots of red flags before finding ourselves in squarely over our heads -- an overheating motor was explained away as having had an undersized thermostat installed. Plausible enough. The lack of a bimini in August in Florida was just forgotten, but led to pretty significant overheating to me. The autopilot not working we didn't realize until about 15 miles offshore. That the autopilot was draining all the other batteries we didn't realize until we lost navigation lights. Etc. Etc.
This was embarrassingly recent, but suffice to say a LOT of lessons were learned. The boat was foreign enough that I accepted too many "explanations" as comfort when they should have been a reason to abort. Failures compounded and voila, we're now 15 hours away from civilization flying a spinnaker through thunderstorms at night and positively hauling ass.
Eventually we got the owner to appreciate our discomfort enough and how over our heads we were to head to safety in Charleston (he'd still just been heading east, which was baffling -- but apparently it is not everyone's first instinct to go to safety when life-threatening failures crop up) but that brought its own perils -- coming into a crowded channel at night without navigation lights isn't advised. We were shining a flashlight onto the sails, but the flashlight would change modes if it wasn't held steadily enough. One of the storms we'd sailed through had killed the owner's phone as well as his phone charger, so the little bits of navigation we had were precious, but necessary coming into shallower coastal waters. A cargo ship coming out of harbor kicked us out of the channel just enough that we ended up grounded and stuck pretty squarely about a half mile away from restaurants, but late enough on a Sunday that there wasn't any other traffic we could hail down. (A radio would have been lovely in that case)
I was sunburnt and heat-stroked enough that despite guzzling water constantly, I hadn't urinated in 24 hours, and though we were in relative calm, the totality of circumstances, I used the last of the dwindling battery on the last usable phone among us to call the coast guard for evacuation. The owner of the boat stayed behind.
To paraphrase Cheryl Strayed -- If you'd asked me at any point in the journey, I was absolutely miserable, but on the whole it was miraculous. Gained a ton of skills. Learned a ton of red flags to look out for. Experienced a lot of firsts, not the least of which included a crash course in celestial navigation. And being 200 miles offshore and awake the whole night during the Perseid meteor shower was absolutely brilliant.
I'm glad you lived to tell the tale, stranger.
Honestly glad my wife was aboard as it lowered my risk threshold enough to get me to want to abort.
Sounds a lot like ocean racing sailboats under normal circumstances.
I quit ocean racing (after about 5 seasons) when I had a sudden realisation that the only part that was any fun in the last 3 days was sitting in the bar after it was over and talking about it. And there were ten times as many non-crew people there enjoying that with us as there were crew on the boat I raced on.
I guess this is the first time it's occurred to me that hikers and backpackers and such carry them too, which is odd because I hike and backpack.
I picked up the InReach after finding myself 200 miles offshore in a sailboat without an engine or battery power (which meant no VHF or electronic navigation equipment or autopilot or even red/green lights for others to see us at night) nor any way to make power
I assume the 406 Mhz beacon has a range of a few miles?