THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, October 26, 1994 TAG: 9410260431
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LANE DEGREGORY, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: OREGON INLET LENGTH: Medium: 57 lines
Watermen trying to travel through the thick fog that blanketed the mid-Atlantic seaboard Tuesday morning found the trip even more difficult when their primary navigational aid went down for almost 90 minutes.
The Long Range Aid to Navigation - LORAN - sends signals from land-based towers every half-second so that boat captains can gauge their location up to 500 miles offshore.
Without LORAN or the more expensive Global Positioning System (GPS), watermen cannot easily determine where they are.
``If you're out so far at sea where there aren't any markers,'' Coast Guard Lt. Norm Mason said, ``you pretty much rely on LORAN.''
From 10 a.m. until about 11:30 a.m. Tuesday, the LORAN signals usually transmitted from the Seneca, N.Y., station were not sent. The outage, which had been planned for 30 days, affected thousands of watermen from Maine through North Carolina.
``We had to replace a bad breaker on the LORAN's northeastern chain,'' said Mason, whose office is in Seneca. ``Unfortunately, there was no way getting around it without the system completely going down. It's quite unusual. Doesn't happen more than once a year. And we notified everyone a month ahead of time so they'd know.''
Although Coast Guard officials broadcast notices about the planned outage on the marine radio, and stations along the Atlantic seaboard posted warning signs, many boaters did not seem to have heard the news.
Throughout Tuesday morning, cacophonic chatter crackled through the marine radio along the Outer Banks as watermen called the Coast Guard trying to find their way through the fog.
``I'm in the middle of the Albemarle Sound in the fog and we've lost our LORAN,'' one skipper told the Coast Guard.
Time after time, the Coast Guard sent back word that the navigational system would be off until noon.
And one captain, traveling down Pamlico Sound, told others on marine radio that he had GPS and if they could find his boat, they could follow him up the sound.
``Most people get their LORAN fix every hour or so,'' said Coast Guard Quartermaster J. Marshall of the Fifth District office in Portsmouth. ``Hopefully, by being down only two hours, boaters did not miss too many signals. They were able to get their location again before noon.''
The Fifth District office oversees waters from New Jersey through North Carolina.
Despite the LORAN being down and the heavy fog, spokesmen for the Coast Guard's Fifth District office said Tuesday afternoon that they had not received any reports of distressed or lost vessels during the outage. ILLUSTRATION: Map
by CNB