The story of the Mars Rescue Odyssey

So here is what happened with the "Rescue Mission"

First of all I want to preface this: We (the rescue committee) have discussed what to reveal about the mission and have decided on what follows. We will not reveal any more information and did not collect any viable evidence that Reid was not where he says he is. If we had found Reid and made some video tapes that would have been an entirely different circumstance. In absence of that though, no further information as to the identity of the rescue crew will be offered. If someone wants to contact the crew of the boat(Kiwis living in Spain currently sailing somewhere in the southern ocean) for subpoenas, affidavits, or statements I suspect there will problems reaching them.

The first target for searching was the last reported position from the Reid Stowe web site. The "Rescue" ship arrived on station at about 20:00 local time, about 4 hours after the coordinates were posted to Reids web site; with their calculated 2 knot drift rate we thought they should easily be in range, and commenced a radar sweep of the area out to a 25 mile range setting. No dice, and rescue crew reported in. After some thought by the rescue committee at the "rescue coordination center(local pub)." We thought about sending them around in a search pattern but didn't want to find the cheese scow in the dark. There was as well a concern that the Anne might be lights out so we told them to button things up for the night, but keep a sharp lookout to avoid a bowsprit collision with an unlit boat.

That afternoon I reported on SA that the rescue crew had arrived and found nothing. A fellow that goes by Bloodygazza did some research and found a source of raw position data, regularly updated, on the Metocean web site. He calculated a position for the rescue crew to start searching at first light...

The rescue crew got up early and headed out to do another radar sweep at the calculated position at first light... Again nothing. At this point it was becoming obvious that Reid Stowe didn't want to be found so they shut down the radar (Reid claims to have a radar detector) and waited for new instructions.

We then got the next position report from the Metocean web site and sent the crew there straight away. It took them about an hour to get there and they lit up the radar again. Nothing again! So we had a conference...

We decided that obviously Reid was not where he was purported to be. He was clearly hiding and we were on a wild goose chase without air support. So we told them to stop the search and head to port.

When the rescue crew arrived on scene and didn't find anything, a member of the media contacted Reid's media contact for comment, the fellow responded with an email that stated that "Mike(the reporter) was a threat to the Anne and he was going to contact their Coast Guard liaison." Mike asked to talk to talk to their Coast Guard liaison but his request was ignored.

Our post action analysis, though this is all supposition: Reid probably knew what was going on and didn't want to be found... We are not experts with Reid's tracking equipment, but I would expect that it has been designed to operate reliably and accurately. I don't suspect that it has been hardened from tampering or modification as we know(from their own posts) that Reid was able to locally manipulate the equipment when there was a problem with it. After analyzing several days of posts posts to their blog and tracking data; We suspect that...
1) They have figured out how to manipulate the local time setting in the Metocean tracker and have put in an offset of at least 24 hours. In other words today we are seeing where they were at least yesterday.
2) They dropped their radar reflector.
3) They may have dropped their sails
4) They detected the search radar on their detector.
5) They motored on an evasive course as we see from their course data.

We regret that we posted ahead of time what we were up to and gave Reid a chance to evade detection. THE NEXT TIME we will not give him any advance warning, and without him taking an evasive course should be fairly easy to find. WATCH OUT REID, there will be another attempt when the opportunity presents itself!

In response to concerns about how we would approach the idea of actually rescuing the crew of the cheese schooner Anne...

The idea of approaching the cheese schooner under the circumstances is actually pretty dicey. I would not encourage ANY single hander or cursing couple to do it alone. Think about what could be going on there... Either or both of them could be totally nutter. Either could have killed the other. They might be armed and nuts as well. This could be more treacherous than a Coast Guard boarding of a drug runner, at least drug runners would generally be predictable.

Say she was on the cheese schooner, yelling to the rescue crew "please take me." If Reid didn't want to let her go there wouldn't be a lot of choices to rescue her short of boarding the boat(PIRACY).
Say we did board the boat to get her, who is to say that Reid isn't going to start shooting at us with whatever pirate repellent system he might have rigged up?
Say Reid lets us send the tender over and collect her, who is to say that he or the Reed Hovians wouldn't try to make some kind of nutter abduction claim afterwards.
Now if she jumped in and tried to swim for it, we would have had a potential problem... The rescue boat was told to stand off at a distance that neither of them would try to make a swim for it until the situation was clear.

On the other hand, say that Sayanara wants off and Reid wants her off too. That is a whole different situation...
The crew was told to refuse to take only Sayanara, that would leave Reid alone on a boat that would be impossible for him to handle. Instead they were to try to negotiate that both of them would come onto the rescue boat and tow the cheese schooner. OR, if Reid was willing, to bring Sayanara onto the rescue ship and tow the cheese schooner with Reid still aboard to the nearest port.

While we were interested in a good laugh we were not interested in becoming the target of a criminal prosecution in a third world country or a nutter with a flare gun.