NavList:

Im not taking a team building exercise too seriously lol! But it's a good opportunity to point out some other ways the merchant navy has changed massively in the last few decades which has made a lot of the conventional wisdom obsolete.

Due to the increased automation of ship bridges most ships now operate with single watchkeepeers often in contravention of the rules. It's not often the case now that you have three eagle eyed men bravely scanning the horizon for anything unusual. Nowadays you probably have one guy sat behind a bunch of monitors watching a film on his phone, only looking up when an alarm goes off. The EPIRB directly radios the satellites with your GPS position which generates an alert which is broadcast to every ship near your location via Sat-C. This sets off an alarm, that the officer of the watch is legally obliged to get up and acknowledge... They will know where you are and more importantly the search and rescue coordination centre will know they know where you are and they will be legally obliged to come get you.

Good luck with the mirror...there's so much shite at sea now. Even if we saw flashing from the horizon without some form of mayday or red flares we would ignore it and assume it was glare from a distant fishing boats windows or something. 

And the radar reflectors on life rafts are next to useless... If there is any kind of swell ... There was a crew a couple of years ago that abandoned ship into a life raft about 20 miles offshore near Barcelona... A very busy shipping lane... Flares, radar reflector, SART, mirror, bright orange liferaft... No epirb ... Four days before anyone saw them... They had run out of water.