As a thought experiment: let's pretend they had a 406 MHz beacon. What's the point at which you activate it? My understanding was that "being lost" by itself isn't good enough, but nearly out of food or water would be. But in this case SAR resources were being deployed anyway. Knowing what they knew at the time what's the right time to have activated a PBL had they had one?
When I took my private pilot training, I was taught that if you have to make a precautionary landing (a controlled landing other than your destination, usually not at an airport), and you have no way of contacting the authorities, you were to wait until the SAR time on your flight plan (usually 1 hour after your ETA), and then manually activate your ELT (emergency locator transmitter). The theory was that (1) no-one would be organizing a search until you were reported overdue, so you would just be wasting battery power; (2) once you were reported overdue, the search and rescue people would come looking for you, so the sooner you were found the better off everyone would be.
I would follow the same logic today - even if I had plenty of supplies and knew where I was, as soon as I knew or had reason to believe that SAR had been alerted, I would activate the PLB, if only to make their job easier.
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