Burnham-On-Sea Coastguards were called out on Saturday morning (May 26th) to investigate a distress beacon alert.
The Burnham-On-Sea team was paged at 11.29am by HM Coastguard Operations Centre in Milford Haven to investigate a beacon alert that had been received.
“The beacon was emitting a signal that needed to be pin pointed. There was a chance it was in the Brean beach area but with the sea mist hanging off the shore there was no visibility from the beach,” explained a spokesman.
“As we liaised with the ops room they were waiting for a satellite pass to get a more focused location before we left station.”
“The satellite on each pass collates information from a different direction and after two passes it had narrowed down the area to somewhere outside of the UK which means we could stand down.”
“Although it is a wide area at first, with multiple areas of interest, with every pass it is narrowed down until a small traingulated area is pin pointed and searched.”
“As our local area showed up in the initial ping it made sense to have assets on the move to avoid delays should any rescue be needed.”
In the end, the location turned out to be a location in Germany and no-one was in difficulty locally.
“This was just a glimpse into the kind of work behind the scenes that the Coastguards undertake, distress calls can come from many different places within the UK and around the world, but with their skilled training our ops room cooly handle every incident.”
