Coast Guard and Search and Rescue Editing and Proofreading Services

Search and rescue documentation is written in two registers that could hardly be further apart. On the operational side, a tasking message or a search action plan is read by a crew who need to act on it immediately and correctly, in poor conditions, with no opportunity to seek clarification. On the other side sit reports that will be read by a coroner, a review board, or the family of someone who did not come home. The same organisation produces both, often within the same twenty-four hours, and the second is written by people who have not slept.

We edit what coast guard and rescue coordination organisations produce — search action plans and tasking messages, standard operating procedures and mission checklists, incident and mission reports, search suspension decisions and their rationale, communications to families of missing persons, marine safety information and navigational warnings, vessel inspection and detention documentation, pollution response plans and incident reporting, training material and exercise scenarios, memoranda of understanding with partner agencies and volunteer organisations, public safety campaigns for recreational boaters, and post-incident review and lessons-learned reports. Our editors check that procedural documents can be executed under stress and that reports record the reasoning available at the time rather than the reasoning available afterwards.

The decision to suspend an active search is the hardest document this field produces, and the one most likely to be read by people in acute distress. It has to record a defensible operational judgement and communicate it to a family, and those are genuinely two documents that are often collapsed into one. We work on the operational record so it states what was searched, with what assets, over what area and probability of detection, what the survivability assessment was and on what basis — so a reviewer can follow the reasoning without hindsight distorting it. We write the family communication separately, so it says plainly that active searching has stopped, what that means and does not mean, what will continue, who to contact, and — because families ask this above all — what would cause the search to resume. Neither document is improved by the softening language that tends to enter both, and families in particular describe vagueness at this moment as the thing they remember.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including operational records, ongoing incidents and material subject to inquiry. We are editors rather than operational or legal advisers, and we offer no view on any tactical or command decision. What we can do is make procedures unambiguous and reports clear, and we are conscious that some of this material concerns people who died.