04/29/2024
Are you and your vessel fully prepared to face an emergency at sea? Take advantage of Bluewater's Mayday Sale and save 15% on select medical and safety products. Update your onboard AED, freshen up on your first aid skills, or add a personal strobe to your emergency grab bag.
Sale on these select emergency items ends May 17th.
History and use of Mayday Procedure
The "mayday" procedure word was conceived as a distress call in the early 1920s by Frederick Stanley Mockford, officer-in-charge of radio at Croydon Airport, England. He had been asked to think of a word that would indicate distress and would easily be understood by all pilots and ground staff in an emergency. Since much of the air traffic at the time was between Croydon and Le Bourget Airport in Paris, he proposed the term "mayday", the phonetic equivalent of the French m'aidez ("help me").
1. Mayday: Concerns an immediate threat to life or the vessel.
2. Pan-pan: There is an emergency aboard a vessel, yet there is not immediate danger to life, or the safety of the vessel itself.
3. Sécurité: A radio call that issues navigational or meteorological warnings, and any other warning needing to be issued that may concern the safety of life at sea.
All three are defined in the COLREGS (International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea) 1972
