The first time you make a real distress call is the worst possible time to be working out the procedure. Adrenaline shrinks your brain to the size of a walnut, and the radio protocol you half-remember from a course three years ago evaporates. The fix is not heroism, it is a laminated card by the chart table and a clear idea of how the system on the French coast actually works. The procedure itself is international, so what you learned on an RYA course holds good in French waters, but a few French specifics are worth knowing before you need them.
Three levels, three words
Marine radio has exactly three priority calls and they are not interchangeable.
Mayday is for grave and imminent danger to a vessel or a person. Sinking, fire, a serious injury, a man overboard you cannot recover. You are asking for immediate assistance.
Pan-pan, said as three repetitions, "pan-pan, pan-pan, pan-pan", is the urgency signal. The situation is serious but not immediately life-threatening: you have lost your engine in a strong tide, you are taking water slowly and managing it, you have a sick crewmember who needs medical advice. You want help or advice but nobody is about to die in the next minute.
Securite, the safety signal, prefaces a navigation or weather safety message. You will hear CROSS use it constantly off the French coast to broadcast gale warnings and navigational hazards. You rarely originate one yourself as a yacht.
Getting the level right matters. A pan-pan dressed up as a mayday wastes rescue resources; a mayday downgraded to a pan-pan out of British understatement can get you a slower response than your situation needs. If life is in danger, it is a mayday. Do not be polite about it.
Who is listening on the French coast
The French coastguard service is CROSS, the regional operational surveillance and rescue centres, and they coordinate everything that happens to you at sea. Coverage is divided by area. CROSS Gris-Nez handles the eastern Channel up to the Strait of Dover. CROSS Jobourg covers the central Channel. CROSS Corsen sits near Brest covering the western approaches and Brittany. CROSS Etel covers the Bay of Biscay down to the Spanish border, and there are centres for the Mediterranean too. All of them keep watch on VHF channel 16 and DSC channel 70 around the clock, every day of the year.
That means a distress call anywhere along the French coast reaches a professional rescue coordinator monitoring continuously. They are competent in English for distress work, so do not let language fear stop you transmitting. If you can manage a few French courtesy phrases it smooths routine traffic, and the VHF French phrases piece covers those, but in a genuine emergency plain English is fine and expected.
Use the DSC button first
Modern VHF sets with DSC have a distress button under a sprung cover. Pressing and holding it sends a digital distress alert on channel 70 that includes your identity and, if the set is connected to GPS, your exact position, automatically, in a fraction of a second. This is the fastest and most reliable way to raise the alarm, because it gets your position to CROSS without you having to read out a string of numbers under stress.
For this to work, your set needs a programmed MMSI and a GPS feed. If those are not sorted, sort them before you cruise, which is what the VHF licence, DSC and MMSI for France article is about. After the DSC alert goes out, you follow it up by voice on channel 16. The digital alert says "someone here needs help and is at this position"; the voice call says who, what, and how many.
The voice mayday, word for word
This is the script to have written down. Tune to VHF 16, high power, and say:
MAYDAY, MAYDAY, MAYDAY. THIS IS (boat name, three times). MAYDAY (boat name once). My position is (latitude and longitude, or a bearing and distance from a charted point). I am (nature of distress: sinking, on fire, holed). I require immediate assistance. I have (number of persons) on board. (Any other useful information: liferaft, EPIRB activated, abandoning to liferaft.) OVER.
Then release the transmit button and listen. CROSS will answer. Speak slowly, the position is the single most important thing, and if you sent a DSC alert they already have it, so you are confirming rather than racing.
A pan-pan follows the same shape, replacing the three maydays with "PAN-PAN, PAN-PAN, PAN-PAN" and "ALL STATIONS" or a call to the relevant CROSS, then your boat name, position, and what the problem is.
What CROSS will do with it
Once they have you, the coordinator runs the rescue. They will hold you on a working channel, ask for details, and decide between tasking the SNSM lifeboat (the French equivalent of the RNLI), a helicopter, or a nearby vessel diverted to you. They may put out a relay mayday to other shipping. Your job after the initial call is to keep the radio manned, answer their questions, and report any change. Do not switch off, do not go quiet, and do not stand the call down without telling them, because a silent casualty triggers an escalation you do not want.
If the situation is genuinely beyond the radio, fire is spreading, the boat is going down faster than you can talk, that is when the beacon earns its keep. A registered 406 MHz beacon brings the satellites in even when the VHF cannot reach anyone, which is why getting the EPIRB and PLB registration for visiting boats right beforehand matters so much.
A worked example off the Normandy coast
Picture the situation. You are five miles north of Cap de la Hague, the engine has died, you are in a four-knot stream setting you towards a charted overfall, and you have a headsail up but cannot make ground against the tide. Nobody is hurt and the boat is sound. That is a pan-pan, not a mayday: serious, because the tide is carrying you towards danger, but no immediate threat to life.
You would send a DSC urgency alert if your set offers one, then go to voice on channel 16: "PAN-PAN, PAN-PAN, PAN-PAN. ALL STATIONS, ALL STATIONS, ALL STATIONS. THIS IS (boat name, three times). My position is five miles north of Cap de la Hague. I have engine failure and am being set towards the overfalls by a four-knot tide. I have three persons on board and request a tow or assistance. OVER." CROSS Jobourg, which covers that water, answers, takes your details, and decides whether to task the SNSM lifeboat from a nearby station or to ask passing traffic to assist.
Now change one fact: the boat starts taking water faster than the bilge pump can clear it. The moment life is genuinely threatened, the call becomes a mayday and you upgrade without hesitation. That is the judgement the three-level system asks of you, and rehearsing the difference on paper, in calm conditions, is how you get it right when the walnut brain takes over.
Practise the part you can practise
You cannot rehearse a real mayday, but you can rehearse everything around it. Know where the DSC distress button is by feel, in the dark. Have the script and your MMSI written on a card taped by the radio. Make sure every adult aboard can find channel 16, read the position off the plotter, and recite the mayday format. Run a dry drill once a season with the radio on low power or with the set's test function, talking through the words without transmitting.
The procedure is simple and it is the same in French waters as British ones. The only thing that defeats people is unfamiliarity at the moment they can least afford it. Write it down, fit the MMSI, know the button, and the French coast becomes one of the better-covered cruising grounds in Europe to have an emergency in, which is not a sentence you ever want to test, but a reassuring one to carry with you.
