Introduction:  The motivation for this "boat watch" concept occurred in 1998 as many requests via ham radio came into the Maritime Mobile Service Net to locate vessels either missing or overdue at their planned destinations.  At that time we compiled a list of various ham radio related networks associated with mariners, then expanded it to include non-ham entities.  The result is a world wide network of e-mail addresses through which we now broadcast requests for lost or overdue vessels and messages of high priority such as requests for mariners to phone home for an important message usually dealing with illness or death in the family.  To date we have successfully contacted approximately 100 vessels, many in record time, and have verified passage of the priority information.

This network is not limited to ham radio participants; a majority of the located vessels in fact have been those with no ham radio capability.  Our word travels throughout our network into the various marine communities where there is a high probability the subject vessel is anchored right next to one of our net participants.

In the pages that follow, is a description the Process for submitting a boat watch incident, providing an introduction to the various members of this network and  a report form which may be used for bringing an incident to our attention.  Click (here) to see a definition of the report process.