What is AMVER? They are the most amazing world-wide maritime search and rescue network that you probably have never heard of. AMVER stands for the Automated Mutual Assistance Vessel Rescue System. It was founded over fifty years ago, in 1958, and currently over 19,000 ships are enrolled. How does it work? The ships, which voluntarily enroll in AMVER, report their positions on a regular basis. When an distress call is received, often by a triggered EPIRB, AMVER calculates the closest ships to the vessel in distress and vectors them to the stricken vessel.
Just last week an AMVER enrolled vessel, Sunbelt Spirit, diverted toward an EPIRB signal and picked up two Canadian men in a liferaft off the coast of Nicaragua in a joint SAR operation with the US Coast Guard. Roughly two weeks ago the AMVER enrolled container ship CGA-CGM La Scala rescued four sailors from a capsized sailboat one thousand miles east-southeast of Bermuda. (There is a video of the La Scala rescue after the jump.)
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[iframe: title=”YouTube video player” class=”youtube-player” type=”text/html” width=”480″ height=”295″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/RpC3ueQnwpA” frameborder=”0″]
Thank you for sharing the Amver story! We’re always happy to see others interested in safety at sea. The stories you shared are just the a few of the many amazing rescues we have each year.
Wishing you fair winds and following seas!
I have been an AMVER fan now for at least twenty years now. Well before the internet.
When I was a naval architect at US Lines way back when, I remember a rescue by a US Lines container ship in the North Atlantic at night. The Captain told me that without the Coast Guard folks in New York at the Battery tracking the EPIRB signal and his ship’s transponder that he never would have found the capsized catamaran whose crew they rescued.
Amver and the participating ships do amazing things and save so many lives every year.
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