Larry wrote:
"Keith" wrote in
oups.com:

Why in the world would you want a 911 only cell phone on the water,
when you should have a VHF, preferable interfaced with a GPS to call
for help?



You're 20 miles off the SC coast. A thunderstorm cell snuck up on you,
we have them all summer, and dismasted you. For some unknown reason, the
diesel won't start. Maybe it got flooded while sailing when water backed
up into the exhaust over the anti-siphon loop heeled over, who knows.

...


I actually had a experience such as this, though not as extreme.

It was the during the first day of the delivery of our new catamaran
from Whitby (outside of Toronto) towards the Erie Canal in Oswego. We
were powering across Lake Ontario in large following seas, surfing at
13+ knots. The mast was down in preparation for the canal. After
doing the first 50 miles in about 7 hours, both engines started
cutting out. I, of course, was completely unfamiliar with the new
Yanmars.

The although the VHF antenna was hooked up, it's radiation pattern is
a disk, so most of the signal was going up or down. This concept
eluded me until the moment we raised the the mast and it suddenly hit
me why the lock tenders never heard the fixed VHF. Since then I've
always carried an emergency antenna. However, placed on deck, the
line of sight would only have been a few miles and since the lake
appeared completely devoid of life, its not clear we could have
summoned help.

The bag phone however, had a clear signal 60 miles to (I assume) the
CN tower in Toronto. The factory folks advised me that the rough
passage had probably loosened some sludge which clogged the
anti-siphon valves. I kept the engines going by manually pumping the
fuel pumps, and when we made Oswego we found that indeed the valves
were clogged. We never determined if it was manufacturing debris in
the tank, or a bad load of fuel, but we haven't had a fuel related
problem since.