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Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

One wonders if you could drop a battery operated GPS beacon reporting by satellite on these things to report back their position once a day once it has been abandoned. Something like that should be able to run for a couple of years at least.

Maritime salvage law is always interesting as it feels like it was mostly written in the 1600 and 1700's :-)

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My company [1] is developing a solution just like this one, with added inertial monitoring. It is meant for studying a vessel's or a platform's maximals movements at sea remotely, for fuel consumption optimization in principle, but it is also useful for black box purposes.

It does not use AIS but Iridium, so the device can relay custom information. In this case, it could have been useful to know about the vessel's health from how it was moving: it would have been very easy to know if it was going to sink if it would have begun to list to one side permanently, for example. It would have been just a matter of dropping our box and a big solar panel on deck.

[1] http://core-marine.com

In addition to that, it feels like the navy / coast guard could drop that GPS beacon off when they rescue the crew and have a live map that shows the vessels set adrift so that others can avoid hitting them, especially in a storm. Vessel ID and size, GPS coordinates and notify the owner to go pick it up.

The US and Russian navies have maritime surveillance satellites; for them, it has presumably never been “lost”.

The Chinese have some too, but I guess they only bother with their back yard. ESA were doing something commercial too, but I haven’t been following details.

Interesting idea, it sounds like it would certainly be technically possible. But what about the legality? If an owner can't be readily identified, would there be any legal problem with a foreign government placing a GPS beacon on a derelict ship? As others have pointed out, maritime law can be somewhat antiquated in ways, perhaps this is a legal grey zone?

I don't know maritime law, but it looks like the law of salvage kicks in? [1] Hopefully one of the surviving rescued crew could offer hints as to the owner or shipping company.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_salvage

The crew are (were) paid by a crewing agency, typically providing a crew to the charterer, who finds a ship from some shipowner or other to offer freight services to commercial clients.

The shipowner is invariably located in a PO Box in a jurisdiction which makes Swiss banks seem downright extrovert; however, this is just a shell company controlled by an opaque holding company, &c.

Global shipping is a rather murky business, designed to facilitate tax and responsibility avoidance.

If this sounds interesting, investigative journalist Ian Urbina published a most informative (and scary) book on the subject last year - Outlaw Ocean.

That book does sound interesting, thanks for the recommendation. Though the global shipping industry is not usually what I read about in my leisure time, this sounds like a worthwhile venture.

Indeed it is; he looks into various shady aspects of the marine industry - rogue fisheries, shipping, waste dumping, slavery &c - a grim read by anyone's standards.

On a related, but lighter note, the memoirs of Max Hardberger (Marine repo man, more or less) is an excellent collection of sea stories of the "Improvised ingenuity and brazenness while under fire" kind. I believe it was called "Seized!"

I'm definitely going to check it out.

And slavery, you say? How does this manifest? Are we talking about Somalian pirates conscripting poor people in third world countries or something? I have read that following the collapse of Libya after Qaddafi's overthrow, things degenerated so badly that slaves began to be bought and sold and are even sold there today - but I suppose I've never dug too deep into who's buying them and for what purpose.

And I love a good memoir, especially of a seafarer! That'll be going straight on my Amazon wishlist, thanks!

-The slavery bit I referred to is perhaps more accurately described as forced labour; the concept being that crewing agencies of the unscrupulous type trawl the countryside recruiting crew for offshore fisheries; the crew then have their ID papers confiscated and are put on vessels doing long stints offshore without any option of leaving, often for years on end, as the vessels they crew are more like rafts, being resupplied from shore rather than going back ashore themselves.

This is often 'legal' in the sense that the (more often than not illiterate) crew have signed contracts stating that they need to repay a sign-on fee equating years worth of wages.

Sometimes, they just sink them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9HW5361bBs

There were rumors the Air Force got to use a water-landed SpaceX booster for target practice back in 2018, too. https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/18343/did-the-u-s-air-...

This came ashore only a few miles from where I live, apparently there is a lot of confusion over who even owns the boat, media is saying it was stolen twice, US coast guard tried to identify owner when the crew was initially rescued.

Commercial shipping is one of the shadier businesses out there for sure, nothing should surprise about opaque ownership schemes.

this was resolved mostly after the PRESTIGE incident and now shipping is no more or less as shady as all other major industries. The Flag Administrations have records of the beneficiary Owners and you can go to http://www.equasis.org/ and get plenty of information about the Owners of the vessel.

> shipping is no more or less as shady as all other major industries.

The more I think about this the worse it sounds. Big oil, car manufacturing, aviation, big tech companies, big pharma and agricultural companies. As soon as you think of a big industry you recall a recent or ongoing scandal. It’s grim.

A lot of things can be done, the problem is getting countries to be responsible about it and implement sane laws. This is not a technological problem.

Adding an AIS transponder to that kit would also be a great way to enhance safety - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste...

AIS transmits much more frequently usually between 3 minutes and 2 seconds depending on speed. [0] AIS is also supplemental and basically every large vessel will have radar available that will spot these kinds of dead drifting ships.

[0] Large 300 ton+ ships are type A: https://help.marinetraffic.com/hc/en-us/articles/217631867-H...

True ... but there are thousands of us that sail (sailed) small yachts which have a more limited range if they have radar at all (power consumption and antenna height cause certain restrictions). AIS on the other hand works great and also integrates with chart plotters for collision alarm with relatively small amounts of power. Small yacht sailors generally assume that cargo vessels will NOT try to avoid them, so having the ship continue on its (drifting) course wouldn't be too surprising.

I had a small AIS transponder on my 30 foot boat. All smart and prudent skippers will have one now that the tech is so cheap.

I realize I half finished my thought the main issue with adding AIS is the increased frequency increases power draw means you need a larger battery for this beacon. Either that or a solar panel which is more expensive and would get grimy over time and eventually fail.

When the crew is rescued from a ship I can imagine they see the ship as lost and it is probably going to sink. Because that's why they rescued the crew in the first place.

So GPS won't help much.

But I can imagine an other kind of beacon could be useful to recover things from the sunken ship.

I don't think that ships are abandoned and properly lost at sea very often. It's uncommon enough that it was on the front page of the BBC news website, and it's on the front page of HN.

> One wonders if you could drop a battery operated GPS beacon reporting by satellite

What do you mean by GPS beacon? It gets a GPS-position and transmits it... where? Using what carrier?

You do have AIS already, and it is absolutely battery-operable, but I’m not sure to what extent the equipment is battery operated in the real world.

A typical aid transmitter

Yep, exactly what I was thinking. Add a small solar panel and it could probably function for a decade.

I think you're underestimating the harsh nature of the ocean. Few things last for a decade on the ocean without frequent maintenance, high up-front costs, or both - and often not even then.

There's very little intersection between hardware that would last in those conditions and would be cheap enough that coast guards would be willing to just leave it on a ship. Or maybe I'm underestimating the budget of the Coast Guard, but leaving this thing adrift in the first place seems to indicate otherwise...

> One wonders if you could drop a battery operated GPS beacon reporting by satellite on these things to report back their position once a day once it has been abandoned. Something like that should be able to run for a couple of years at least.

>> Yep, exactly what I was thinking. Add a small solar panel and it could probably function for a decade.

> I think you're underestimating the harsh nature of the ocean. Few things last for a decade on the ocean without frequent maintenance, high up-front costs, or both - and often not even then.

A solar powered GPS beacon may be an exception to that rule.

Couldn't you just encase the beacon electronics and the solar panel in a hunk of clear epoxy potting [1], and then secure the thing to the deck with stainless steel screws? For an application like this, it's probably sufficient that the beacon only operate during daylight hours, so you probably don't even need a battery.

I don't imagine the electronics would cost much more than that for a PLB [2], so we're talking somewhere in the ballpark of $500. The main expense would be the receiving satellite and sending a helicopter to the ship for installation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potting_(electronics)

[2] https://www.rei.com/c/personal-locator-beacons

Even stainless steel will probably fail in the ocean. The sea is an absurdly harsh environment. Look up sacrificial anodes or ultra high corrosion resistant alloys to get an idea of what you need to keep stuff going even for just a few years.

We had a monitoring unit in a heavy aluminum box on a buoy a couple km off Biscay (the HARSHLab, heh...) that lasted half a year, until the stainless bolts corroded against the aluminum and the lid flew right off. Polycarbonate boxes have worked better for us.

Won't the polycarbonate suffer UV degradation?

Tuna radar buoys are dropped regularly in the sea, and are quite a bit north of $500, I believe. They are not expected to be recovered, work completely off solar, and are closed solid. You need a magnet to turn them on through a reed switch, they don't even have a hole for a button to prevent water ingress.

I agree with you that ocean beacons are treated harshly. That said, we have an interesting exemplar of a battery powered beacon that reports in daily in the NOAA sea buoy transponder package.

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