One other thing that's not yet clear: some news articles say the automatic EPIRB failed, and that a crewman swam from a lifeboat to the wreck to ... do something that activated it?

I don't understand this at all. How does one look at a EPIRB from a life-raft and see that it's not working? Maybe it could be seen under debris that would block transmission?

I looked at the SARSAT packet format a couple of years ago and from memory I don't recall any way to indicate if the beacon was activated automatically or manually. But I may remember wrong, or perhaps SARSAT assigns *two* beacon IDs to such EPIRBs to indicate how it activated. Perhaps the Brazilians had a positive indication that it was someone pushing a button and thought that was a non-emergency activation? I'm trying to be generous here...

The boat is Canadian so the EPIRB is probably registered in Canada. Don't SARSAT alerts go through the nation-of-registration at some point in the alert process? I thought in a case like this the Canadians would be notified right away if any of their beacons activated anywhere in the world? I register my cell phone # with my PLB and had assumed this was so someone could call and check for accidental activation before launching a $$$ and risky search.

Good for the crew that nobody was lost.