Amen, Jack.
If there are any stories, they will only point out that the person didn't
plan and shouldn't have been in that situation in the first place.
Electronics save the day, they don't ruin it.
I had a friend tell me of a several day seminar he attended on celestial
navigation and the use of a sextant. The best lesson he learned is that he
should use the beautiful wooden case for his sextant to carry lots of extra
AA batteries for his backup handheld GPS.

Bill, also USCG Aux, San Diego, CA

"Jack Painter" wrote in message
news:lgG6c.9898$F91.8899@lakeread05...
"JR Minkel" wrote
Pop Science for first-person accounts of dramatically frustrating
battery
failures in portable electronics--cell or sat phones, CBs, laptops,
GPS monitors, etc. We thought one category might be people lost at sea
because a battery died. To qualify, the battery must have died of
"natural" causes (as in, not exploding) in some portable electronic
device (as in, not the boat's battery) at an extremely inopportune
moment. If you have a story like that, please email me directly at
jrm@naswxxxorg (replace the triply repeated letter with a period). My
deadline is this Monday March 22nd, but I'll take them up to a few
days after. Please feel free to forward this to friends and
colleagues.

Horror-stories-at-sea because of hand held equipment battery-failure is a
total non-starter. The opposite is the rule, where fixed equipment fails
due
to fire, immersion, main battery failure, engine failure, etc., and the
hand-held battery-powered equipment came to the rescue.

The whole premise of the story-line appears to be frivoulous in nature, to
imply that anyone's primary safety or ability to navigate,
cruise/sail/fish,
auto-tour, etc. was based on the sole performance of a portable battery.
That is unless you're trolling for stories more likely found in the
Enquirer
than Popular Science..

Jack
USCG Auxiliary, Virginia Beach, VA