Hypo Hoist Man Overboard Recovery System

A major step forward in marine safety the Hypo Hoist has been specifically designed to rescue a conscious or unconscious person from the water and back onto the safety of the vessel, whilst minimising risk and injury to the casualty. An important attribute of this new system is that just just one person, clearly a key factor in a lightly crewed vessel, can deploy it.

By lifting a MOB vertically can cause a rapid drop in blood pressure, greatly increasing the chances of cardiac failure and neurological malfunctions, but Hypo Hoist significantly reduces such risks – and the potential problems caused by the effects of immersion hypothermia – by maintaining the casualty in a constant horizontal position during and after recovery.

The main component of Hypo Hoist is its dual function cradle which can be used to either hoist and roll the MOB up the freeboard, level with the deck and back on to the craft, or to operate as a boarding ladder with hand holds to allow quick and easy access back onto the vessel. (www.seasafe.co.uk)

Hypo Hoist impresses in independent MOB trial
Coastguard spokesman, Andy Lloyd, said, "All six passenger boats had worked on their safety procedures thoroughly beforehand and we had good weather for the exercise with calm seas.

"They came up with different ways to recover a person which was good to see and they all approached the exercise with the right attitude".

Western Lady Ferry Service (WLFS) had two boats taking part and one of them, Western Lady VI, was using the relatively new Hypo Hoist from SeaSafe Systems. Sandie Armstrong, Operations Manager for WLFS, comments, "Fortunately, to date, we have not had to use the Hypo Hoist in normal service but this exercise gave us the opportunity to try it under the watchful eye of both the MCA and the RNLI.

"Using Hypo Hoist the casualty was recovered in about one minute and the MCA and lifeboat crew were both impressed with its ease of use.

"On our other boat we used a conventional "Jason´s Ladder" and had far more problems due to the inflexibility of the unit when bringing a casualty through a narrow boarding gate – in fact both the dummy and the live casualty were in danger of slipping out of the ladder whilst being bought inboard.

"In my opinion, Hypo Hoist is a simple-to-use, effective system and should be recommended to all passenger vessel operators as an affordable and safe means of recovery".