Jock
Race Dog
On Saturday night we got a call for assistance to find a missing biker, he was last seen by the group he was riding with sometime the afternoon. There was some confusion and they thought he had taken another road to where they were staying over. When the group got there and he was not there they started worrying.
Our volunteer search and rescue unit departed at 21:00 and together with SAPS K9 unit, Graskop Fire and Rescue and Phoenix Security started searching just before 22:00. The SAPS K9 unit managed to get a trace on his cell phone which was still on and just ringing.
We found him at 00:20, unfortunately he was not alive.
Reason for the post is, if you have a smartphone please activate some kind of tracking on it and let somebody have the details to track you in the case of an emergency. It takes very long for SAPS to get a triangular track on a phone, and even then it is the GPS co-ordinates of the last tower the cellphone was on. In this case it gave us a radius of plus minus 8.5km from the tower to search. Where does one begin?
The pass's that bikers ride normally have some nice twists and turns. Next time go and have a look at how many previous markings from accidents are on the curbs and Armco of these roads, some you can see are old but some look new.
This rider wasn't even far in and at least 4 vehicles past the spot, until one guy noticed some markings. We also had rain after the accident and thus the grass was very flexible and covered some of the markings.
If he had activated his tracking capability on his Iphone we could have gotten a exact co-ord and would have been able to find earlier.
This in this case would not have saved his life as we presume he died instantly, or even might have had a heart attack during or just before leaving the road as there was also no brake marks, but one never know, in this case only the results of the post mortem will confirm, but it would have helped us find him faster.
So get some kind of tracking activated on your phone please.
Our volunteer search and rescue unit departed at 21:00 and together with SAPS K9 unit, Graskop Fire and Rescue and Phoenix Security started searching just before 22:00. The SAPS K9 unit managed to get a trace on his cell phone which was still on and just ringing.
We found him at 00:20, unfortunately he was not alive.
Reason for the post is, if you have a smartphone please activate some kind of tracking on it and let somebody have the details to track you in the case of an emergency. It takes very long for SAPS to get a triangular track on a phone, and even then it is the GPS co-ordinates of the last tower the cellphone was on. In this case it gave us a radius of plus minus 8.5km from the tower to search. Where does one begin?
The pass's that bikers ride normally have some nice twists and turns. Next time go and have a look at how many previous markings from accidents are on the curbs and Armco of these roads, some you can see are old but some look new.
This rider wasn't even far in and at least 4 vehicles past the spot, until one guy noticed some markings. We also had rain after the accident and thus the grass was very flexible and covered some of the markings.
If he had activated his tracking capability on his Iphone we could have gotten a exact co-ord and would have been able to find earlier.
This in this case would not have saved his life as we presume he died instantly, or even might have had a heart attack during or just before leaving the road as there was also no brake marks, but one never know, in this case only the results of the post mortem will confirm, but it would have helped us find him faster.
So get some kind of tracking activated on your phone please.
