The Great UNSEARCH

of August 09, 2006

 

    Well, things didn't start off as usual.    Joe Doman got a call from the EM wondering if he could locate a place by latitude and longitude.  Huh!!   Can a bear s... in the woods?  Can a SAR member s... in the woods?  You bet!!!!

 

    A quick look using computer magic placed the location in the East portion of Wall-Mart's parking lot in North Bend.

    What the h... ?  Yep, we had the right coordinates.   It turns out there was a EPIRB emergency beacon sending out a distress signal.

    Now EPIRB are used on boats and ELT are used on aircraft while PLB are used by hunters, mushroom pickers and such on land.

    And we had a EPIRB sending out a signal from Wall-Marts.   A boat on a trailer, maybe???

 

    Well, we were going to find out.  The Coast Guard, which normally responds to EPIRBs was busy with a sinking trawler. Beside the USCG doesn't rescue boats in Wall-Mart's parking lot.

 

    Joe Doman, JJ Kellum. Brian Hibden and Bud Berliner arrived at Wall-Mart's at 4:30 PM.

 

    Our coordinator was out of town so the radio locator was in an unknown place.  We were advised that a regular FM radio

tuned to 99.5 would pick up the distress signal.   Now as it turns out, 99.5 on the FM dial in the Bay Area is occupied by a very strong, very loud, Country and Western Station.  Never mind, we were advised --- just turn the volume up.  When you get close to the beacon, you should hear the car burglar alarm wail of the beacon right along with the Golden Oldies.  Soon Wall-Mart's parking lot was crawling with orange vested folks with multicolored radios with antennas extended and Willie Nelson wailing about lost souls.  A few curious civilians wanted to know if we were searching for bombs. 

No lady -- we're looking for Willie Nelson!

 

    Since there were no boats on trailers, we concentrated on vehicles.   Now, four orange clad strangers with loud radios approaching a Wall-Mart employee on her lunch break solving crossword puzzles in her car can be very scary.  After her initial shock, she assured us that nothing unusual had taken place in the parking lot in the last hour. She hadn't even seen Willie Nelson today.

We made a bet among ourselves that she would never leave the building again on her lunch break.

 

    Soon two Sheriff's Office folks showed up with our out-of-town coordinator's radio locator.  They were getting faint signals coming from a different location.  We were advised that the Civil Air Patrol was on the job with their locator.  We went back to looking for Willie Nelson.

 

        Well, to make a short story even shorter, the Civil Air Patrol located the beacon at a house address.  The Sheriff's Guys went to meet up with them.  We packed up our gear and went to the location.   We couldn't find anyone at the address given to us.

A little bit of sleuthing (and a cell phone call) made us realize we were in Coos Bay while the same named street in question was in North Bend.  We weren't embarrassed.  H... after walking around all afternoon with Willie Nelson wailing out of our direction finding equipment, we were impervious to embarrassment.

 

    By the time we got to the right address, everyone had wrapped up and left.  It turned out, the beacon had been stored for safety in the owner's bedroom.   A gremlin (or maybe a couple of ten year old boys who were seen, trying desperately to stay out of sight) had played with the unit and set it off.

 

    We didn't get to see if the beacon could compete with Willie Nelson but we did get a GPS reading at the site.

    We were 1.29 miles off the reported position.  As it turns out, EPIRBs without a GPS hookup, have a three mile radius of accuracy.

    So we were in the right concert.....I mean, stadium......er,...... ball park.