Why should South Africans be expected to risk their lives to go rescue a bunch of rich-kid Americans & Norwegians who found themselves out of their league and out of their depths in the South Atlantic
I don't know. Maybe South Africa should take it up with Norway. The permissions, or lack of same, come from Norway. The "rich kids" are just playing by the rules as they are set up.
And, we've had three expeditions with pretty decent dollars (at least by ham radio standards) all with varying degrees of success.
This one actually came off
better than the first two. It was the first two (with varying degree of "broken boat") that actually were farther in over their heads and actually came closer to needing some kind of rescue.
I don't know why you are singling out the most recent group when, by your professed standards, the other two recent tries deserves
at least as much condemnation.
I don't recall you speaking up back then and I don't understand why you aren't talking about it now. It seems the real critique isn't "after the fact" as you are portraying it.
The better case, by your own professed lights, is exactly what I am suggesting -- changing the rules to rule this sort of thing out of bounds altogether. On grounds that we, as a group, really cannot fund and vet these things adequately, at least not by your lights. And, maybe you can persuade enough of us to agree. This would be so even though most expeditions do come off. Maybe (you presumably would argue) we've just been lucky. If so, we've been lucky for at least 30 years now.
And, I don't see how some of these risks don't happen even at relatively nicer places. If the boat to Baker broke down badly enough -- or if the Braveheart would have broken down to a dozen different places badly enough -- the rescue you are now talking about probably has to happen for those, too, and none of that sort of thing is cheap. Cheaper, maybe, than Bouvet waters, but not free.
Any place with a big, private charter boat requirement is a big deal if we take your argument seriously. That's a lot of places, including some that nobody regards as nearly so difficult as Bouvet.
Still, maybe we need all of these groups to have some sort of indemnification. Or, we let the operators (already spending big bucks) take on the bankruptcy risk.
But it seems like after-the-fact judgements really aren't responsive to what you are talking about. What ought to be the discussion is whether we
really can do these things. We do not, as a group, have an unlimited budget. If a more realistic plan, with adequate safety margins, takes 2 million bucks to activate a Bouvet or Peter I, then we probably should admit we can't do these and take them off the list.
But, limited as it was, 3Y0J actually happened, nobody died or even went to hospital. It is, by any standard, a limited success. It's a strange one to carp about after the very bad turns (that could have been much worse) that preceded it.