A German tourist walked out on off-shore ice to photograph a sunset and couldn't find the direction to shore as darkness fell.

http://www.clickondetroit.com/news/22419282/detail.html

Improvised signaling saved his life...

WOW, of all the luck someone on a webcam saved them!

That's a great story and I can see how you could easily get turned around out there.

Wow, great story!

+ and a big cheers! For ingenuity and creative use of whatever resources at hand!

- A simple button compass stashed away somewhere and he would simply walk back to shore without incident. (Well, not totally true - walking back along a different route he may cross areas of rotten ice).

- A cell phone would make a much more reliable signaling device than a camera flash (I would be astonished if he was out of cell coverage area).

As always there's a lot of details we don't know, so I won't jump to more conclusions than I already have. All is well that ends well. And experienced means someone who has gotten away with doing the wrong thing more often than you have.

its a cool story, and good for the guy who was smart enough to try "anything". But it does seem to highlight (yet again) how being unprepared is so newsworthy.

I heard "somewhere" that preparedness doesn't sell. But news stories about the unprepared "surviving by some miracle" sell handily. I guess thats the irony. if people were more prepared we'd have less interesting news stories!

And cheers to the woman who saw the flashes and didn't brush it off. I wonder how many saw it and ignored it. I noticed in the article that they only mentioned the ONE person contacting the authorities.

I guess anyone can get into trouble without half trying, and it does take away some of your Stupid Points if you manage to get yourself out of it. Kind of...

Sue

I have to wonder how he didn't know at least a rough direction? I mean, he had to walk a certain direction towards the big glowing ball in the sky. Was it dark already, overcast? Obviously things we don't know. But really, you'd think that finding an entire coastline would be a pretty easy target!

Kudos though, for keeping his head on enough to signal somehow.

yeah, and in this world full of webcams, camera phones, and digital cameras everywhere... we don't have nearly enough alien sightings.

off topic, just sayin'

Staying off topic. The Ministry of Defence who are responsible for investigating ufo sightings in the UK, recently gave the figures for the number they had actually bothered to investigate: 0.
The british equivalent of 'the X files'; 'the can't be bothered files'.

The Sock

I'm guessing here... that he went out to see the same sunset as the lady was watching over the web cam. The puzzling fact is that if the sunset is anywhere near interesting you can usually see a faint glow on the sky in the direction long time after the sun actually has gone down (at least at the latitudes we are discussing here). That glow should be a pretty reliable direction indicator => West is THERE, ok the coast should be somewhere in that direction.

But - who are we to know he possessed enough orienteering skills to pull off the above line of reasoning?

After all, who wants to stare at a sunset web cam if there is no glow in the sky? A totally black screen is not very interesting... Most likely, he lost sight of land in the twilight and didn't think of or did not want to wander off in on the rather vague direction provided by "west there - land that way" kind of reasoning.

Getting lost in flat terrain with just minor "bumps" is surprisingly easy. To find shore, you have to distinguish between snow covered "semi-flat" ice (with snow drifts, ice pileups, ridges and so on" and snow covered "semi-flat" terrain (with snow drifts, rocks and so on). That can be hard enough in daylight and next to impossible in twilight - all you see in ANY direction is a flat world with snow drift piles and some ice ridges poking through.

"Northern Germany" is situated at a fairly high latitude. The sunset afterglow may be less directional than that to which most of us low latitude types have experienced. The news story implies that the tourist's disorientation was by no means unique.

Well, from my location Germany is located pretty far to the south... Using the afterglow as direction indicator is pretty inaccurate in most circumstances - but it is fairly easy to say "THERE" is the center of the most intense part of the afterglow.

If that direction is to be used with any precision it requires a bit more astronomical knowledge than the average person possess. Still good enough to take the after glow as "west" (or south west, in my location at this time of year). If you have a rudimentary map image in your head that is plenty good enough to hit the shore. Even so, it may be quite a bit longer before you eventually hit the shore at an angle far from 90 degrees.

If you have limited orienteering skills you may not think of that option. Or may not have confidence that it works. Or try it for a couple of minutes, but loose confidence because you did walk far enough to see land. Or be scared of potential rotten ice in any direction other than your track out there. Or the afterglow was obscured by clouds. Or any other number of variables.

Granted, the afterglow wouldn't be due west, and it was maybe an unfamiliar place to him, but...

Last winter a man and his two kids (13 and 10, IIRC) were snowmobiling out on the Great Lakes or somewhere 'up there'. The father dropped dead and a whiteout of blowing snow descended. The boy took the snowmobile and his sister and followed the only thing he could see, the faded glowing orb in the sky to shore.

Sue

On some of the bigger lakes in my region, an ice fog can rise after sunset. Many of the bigger resorts use rotating beacons on the shoreline to guide ice fisherman back to the landings. No excuse to be without a compass though.