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diver dave

diver dave

Guru
Joined
Jan 13, 2017
Messages
2,570
Location
United States
Vessel Name
Coquina
Vessel Make
Lagoon 380
Folks on this forum tend to be well prepared, and have lots of experience on slow boats far from "help".
My question. What if Uncle Ralph fails to wake from his afternoon nap, and you are many hundreds of miles from port in international waters?
 
diver dave said:
Folks on this forum tend to be well prepared, and have lots of experience on slow boats far from "help".
My question. What if Uncle Ralph fails to wake from his afternoon nap, and you are many hundreds of miles from port in international waters?
Click to expand...

Ever seen "Weekend at Bernie's"..?
Believe it or not, we had to do the pretend thing on the way back from a Mexican Motorcycle adventure years ago...
 
diver dave said:
Folks on this forum tend to be well prepared, and have lots of experience on slow boats far from "help".

My question. What if Uncle Ralph fails to wake from his afternoon nap, and you are many hundreds of miles from port in international waters?
Click to expand...


I think I'd note all the details, take pictures, write it all down, and get someone to witness it. And radio or call it in, if possible. Then clear out some space in the freezer and continue on your way or head to port somewhere.

I doubt his is an uncommon thing given all the boats on the oceans.
 
How deep is it where Ralph doesn't wake up? Ever heard of a burial at sea?


Just kidding. I'll wait for more knowledgeable people to respond because I have no idea what you'd do.
 
Make notification to the USCG by any means available ASAP.

Preserve the body best as possible, document everything.
 
twistedtree said:
Do tell. This sounds like a good one.
Click to expand...

Oh it was! Bringing a dead body across the border was a bit tricky. Had we not played the game, we'd probably still be there tied up in paperwork....and this was in the early 80's. Don't ask me about one of my Honda dealers that tried to cross the border in a new Lincoln with a concealed handgun. He spent a few months in jail for that little adventure.....Lost the Lincoln needless to say...
 
twistedtree said:
I doubt his is an uncommon thing given all the boats on the oceans.
Click to expand...

There is a morgue on every cruise ship. They commonly have more than one drawer. They say that at any given time, every cruise LINE has at least one body in the morgue on at least one of their ships underway.

Someone died on the last cruise I was on. There was a code announced shipwide and I had become friendly with the staff, and a regular at a specific bar on the ship. The code was announced and the bar crew gave an 'OOOOH yikes". When we asked, they explained what the code was and gave us some morbid insight. Obviously they don't use 'code Black' or 'Code Red'. IIRC it was a weird number.
 
diverdave, if it happens in Canadian waters you will have to pay a duty at the border for Uncle Ralph unless exporting a corpse is duty free which would be a rare exception.
 
I guess where I was going with this is:
My freezer won't fit Ralph.
So, 3 options. Keep Ralph on the swim platform, evac by air (hate to make this someone's elses task, or 3, send down deep). Turning into a legal issue. What if there are relatives that won't take kindly of returning home without Ralph?
 
Haf'ta lash him out on the swim platform on our Albin-25
 
If it's me, you have my permission to just feed me to the fishies.

Obviously document as much as possible to satisfy the authorities you didn't murder me.

But then I wouldn't have many people pushing for answers, "at least he died doing what he loved best"
 
I've been on over 400 cruises, and we only had a death on board 3 times ( 2 heart attacks and a stabbing ). Usually its some sort of medical emergency that requires immediate evacuation of someone who is failing fast, but they get them off the ship ASAP. However, we only did short cruises of 3 or 4 days length aimed at Families. I'm sure its more common on longer cruises that focus on the traditional cruiser ( the newly wed and nearly dead )
 
We had a death on a long range boat I was on in Mexican waters, unfortunately it involved playing with industrial explosives and a crew member was killed. We were actually boarded by the Mexican Navy, who was unaware of the incident and allowed us to continue back the the US after inspection. We were quite fortunate they didn't look in the freezer on the upper deck or we would have been in Mexico for some time.

The hassle began when we re-entered the US in San Diego and BATF, Customs, and the Coast Guard began the interviews and interrogations.

All in all a very unfortunate situation...
 
diver dave said:
Thanks; It's all there. Could be useful someday. I've come across several empty rafts at sea and even an active human smuggling operation once. You just never know.
Click to expand...

It's always heart breaking to find empty rafts. You never know if someone got to them in time. One time there were so many rafts drifting past Miami that people were going out to fish for Dolphin fish around them. I saw four or five of them that day. It was the personal items left in them that really got to me.
 
I have had this unfortunate experience, offshore West Africa. A call to the US embassy and a helicopter was on scene within an hour. The body was transported back to the US within a few days, all taken care of by the embassy.

The problems only started when the family wanted an autopsy and the body had of course been embalmed for shipping.
 
We had a term for cruise ship passengers: "The newly wed, the overfed and the nearly dead".
 
I remember maybe 35 years ago a woman arrived in Halifax in a cruising sailboat with her dead husband. They were doing a transatlantic crossing and he died midway. He was pretty badly decomposed, but she couldn't bring herself to bury him at sea. Tough situation to be in. She was distraught, and not even sure why he had died.

I'm sure help of some sort would be more readily available now than it was then. Communication technology has come a long way.

Even though I don't really care what happens to my remains, I've gotta say the idea of becoming fish food is at the bottom of my ranked list. Don't mind dying at sea, but don't want to be dumped overboard.
 
Jeff F said:
I've gotta say the idea of becoming fish food is at the bottom of my ranked list. Don't mind dying at sea, but don't want to be dumped overboard.
Click to expand...

Any worse than worm food?
 
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