Passage Planners

Call Sign & MMSI Number and Emergency Radio Procedure forms.

+ How to make a Mayday call from your boat!

Mayday and Pan-Pan Cockpit Forms.

What is an emergency call? How do you make a Mayday radio emergency or a Pan-Pan emergency radio call? There are three generally accepted emergency calls in order to announce an emergency at sea. They are as follows:

A MAYDAY call is the international standard signal of urgency and is only to be used in the case of “grave and imminent danger to a vessel or persons, such as fire, sinking, man overboard etc.”

The Radio transmission PAN-PAN (pronounced pahn-pahn) is the international standard signal of urgency that a person aboard a boat, ship, aircraft, or other vessel uses to declare that they have an onboard situation that is urgent, but for the time being does not pose an immediate danger to the vessel itself or anyone's life.

SÉCURITÉ is the safety signal normally used prior to announce a safety message relating to navigation. This for instance may be an obstruction in the water within a navigation channel, an approaching storm, military activities in the area or the failure of a navigation light.

No one wants to be in a situation at sea where we have to make a 'Mayday'call or for that matter a 'Pan-Pan' call. Nevertheless we do need to be prepared for it if we have to make such a distress call.

In such stressful moments it is easy to forget ones own name, never mind the necessary details associated with such calls!

Not only that but what if you, the skipper, is not the person making the call due to the fact that in a sudden emergency you may be busy attending to the cause of the emergency? Or worse, you may personally be injured or incapacitated as a result of the emergency.

In this case it may be a member of your crew who has to make the call, or indeed a passenger without any training as to the procedure and protocol of such calls. Scary or what!!

Ok, let’s not go ‘overboard’ on this but it is important that all crew and others on board should be aware of what to do if a distress call needs to be made, or indeed what type of call?

To make this easier we have designed a series of A4 size forms which, in the event of an emergency, can be used by anyone with only the minimum of instruction, in order to make the Coastguard aware of your emergency. The image above shows our cockpit radio card with the Mayday procedure on one side and the Pan-Pan procedure on the reverse. They are written in a manner which makes it easy for the required details to be easily given to the emergency services over the VHF/DSC radio.

The forms need to be kept in a place where they can be easily located, and ideally should be close to a radio, either in the cockpit of at the radio station below deck.

As with our other forms, they are encapsulated in high quality A4 size matt plastic pouches. These provide waterproof surfaces for writing on permanent details with B grade black pencil and are thus able to prompt the user to give the correct details in the required manner to the Coastguard so that the correct action may then be taken in order that help may be given as quickly as possible. Essential details such as the boat’s Name, Call Sign and MMSI number are incorporated within the forms in order to save essential time. The phonetic alphabet is also included at the end of the forms, to make it easier to spell out those details which need to be given clearly and concisely.

Details of our Call Sign & MMSI Number and Emergency Radio Procedure forms are shown below:

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