The Coast Guard announced Monday that the two Hawaii women who say they were lost at sea never activated their emergency beacon, adding to a growing list of inconsistencies that cast doubt on the women’s harrowing tale of survival.

Coast Guard spokesman Lt. Scott Carr said a review of the incident and subsequent interviews with the survivors revealed that they had an Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB) aboard but never turned it on. The women said they chose not to activate the device because they never feared for their lives.

Parts of their story have been called into question, including the tropical storm the two say they encountered on their first night at sea in May. National Weather Service records show no organized storms in the region in early May.

When asked whether the two had the radio beacon aboard, the women said Friday they had a number of other communications devices, but they didn’t mention the EPIRB.

The device communicates with satellites and sends locations to authorities. It’s activated when it’s submerged in water or turned on manually.

During the post-incident debriefing by the Coast Guard, Jennifer Appel, who was on the sailboat Sea Nymph with Tasha Fuiava, was asked whether she had the emergency beacon on board. Appel replied she did and that it was properly registered.

“We asked why, during this course of time, did they not activate the EPIRB,” said Coast Guard spokeswoman Petty Officer 2nd Class Tara Molle, who was on the call to the AP with Carr. “She had stated they never felt like they were truly in distress, like in a 24-hour period they were going to die.”

Carr also said the Coast Guard made radio contact with a vessel that identified itself as the Sea Nymph in June near Tahiti, and the captain said they were not in distress and expected to make landfall the next morning. That was after the women reportedly lost their engines and sustained damage to their rigging and mast.

Experts say some of the details of the women’s story do not add up.

A retired Coast Guard officer who was responsible for search and rescue operations said that if the women used the emergency beacon, they would have been found.

“If the thing was operational and it was turned on, a signal should have been received very, very quickly that this vessel was in distress,” Phillip R. Johnson said Monday in a telephone interview from Washington state.

EPIRBs send a location to rescuers within minutes. The beacons are solid and built to be suddenly dropped in the ocean.

“Failures are really rare,” Johnson said, but added that old and weak batteries also could cause a unit not to work.

It’s not clear whether the pair had tested it before the journey.

The women also said they had six forms of communication that all went dead.

“There’s something wrong there,” Johnson said.

He said he knows of cases in remote Alaska where a ship in distress using just one form of beacon brought a fairly quick response from nearby fishing boats and the Coast Guard.

“I’ve never heard of all that stuff going out at the same time,” he said.

And there’s more that doesn’t add up.

Key elements of the women’s account are contradicted by authorities, weather reports and the geography of the Pacific Ocean. The discrepancies raised questions about whether Appel and Fuiava remember the ordeal accurately or could have avoided disaster.

The Hawaii residents reported that their sailing equipment and engine failed, and said they were close to giving up when the Navy rescued them last week, thousands of miles off course. They were taken to Japan, where they didn’t immediately respond to an email and call seeking comment Monday.

The two women met in late 2016 and, within a week of knowing each other, decided to take the trip together. Fuiava had never sailed.

They planned to take 18 days to get to Tahiti, then travel the South Pacific and return to Hawaii in October.

On their first day at sea, May 3, the two women described running into a fearsome storm that tossed their vessel with 60 mph winds and 30-foot seas for three days.

“We got into a Force 11 storm, and it lasted for two nights and three days,” Appel said of the storm they encountered off Oahu. In one of the first signs of trouble, she said she lost her cellphone overboard.

But the weather service in Honolulu said no organized storm systems were in or near Hawaii on May 3 or in the days afterward. Archived NASA satellite images confirm there were no tropical storms around Hawaii that day; the hurricane season begins June 1.

The pair said they thought about turning back, but said Maui and Lanai don’t have harbors deep enough to accommodate their sailboat. However, at 50 feet long the vessel is relatively small, and both islands have harbors that would have accommodated them.

Plus, West Hawaii has several places to dock.