Vessel Assistance VHF Relay and an observation about Americans

September 1, 2014

While we were making our way between Nuku island and Kenutu Island (anchorage #30) there was quite a bit of radio traffic regarding a vessel to the south of Tonga needing assistance. From what I gathered, there was an elderly single hander on a vessel called Fidel who had left Niue (an island nation to the east of Tonga) and was now adrift because he had lost steering capability. I guess he was making contact with people in Neiafu via satellite phone, because I never actually heard him on the radio, but there was certainly a lot of traffic among the expat community figuring out how they could help him. There were sort of three centers of radio organization that I could identify: 1) The lady that runs the Tropicana Cafe, 2) Barry from Hunga Haven, and 3) Analulu, a land based station who spoke the same language as the guy on Fidel (I’m thinking it was German, but I don’t quite remember), and she served as interpreter. It seemed like they had identified a fishing motor vessel, called The Godfather, who was potentially in the area, but they were having trouble reaching him by radio, possibly because he was out of range.

As we are motoring along in the southern end of the Vava’u group, we thought maybe there was a possibility that we might be able to reach The Godfather. It was probably a long shot but certainly worth a try. So, I got on the horn and hailed The Godfather on VHF 16, and sure enough he responded. So, for the next 20 minutes or so I served as a relay between the land stations in Vava’u, mostly Analulu, and The Godfather in order to give him all the info he would need to find Fidel and help him. Eventually, either because of our movement east to Kenutu or, more likely, because of The Godfather’s movement south, we lost contact and could no longer serve as an effective relay. We learned later that The Godfather cut their day of fishing short, gave the guy a tow to Neiafu, and was never reimbursed for any fuel.

I didn’t really think much of the incident. It had a mostly happy ending, and I’ve become so comfortable on the radio that serving as a relay for something like this was not really any big deal. But our friend from New Zealand had an interesting cultural take on our small role in it. His observation was that Americans are different than British (and Australians and Kiwis.) From his perspective, he thought that when I first got on the radio, all the traffic was kind of chaotic and my offer of assistance wasn’t immediately jumped on. In his words, though, I persisted. I persisted until someone paid attention and realized the help we could provide as a relay. I didn’t really remember it that way, which in a way might support his observation. He said Americans will do what it takes to get a job done, while a Brit might respect order and hierarchy so much that they wait to be asked to help. I interpreted this as being a positive observation about Americans, that if we see something that needs to get done, we are more likely to just do it and less likely to worry about stepping on someone’s toes. Sure, this is a generalization, but Americans get such a bad wrap in the generaliztion department within the international community, I enjoyed hearing this positive one.