They rely on the automation to bring the aircraft on a typical SAR approach and really have no idea how to hand fly it.
At night or in crap weather over the water, why wouldn't you? If its not working as advertised (ie you can't trans down/Hover over the water on a black ass night) don't do it. Sure you may need to be able to recover it (and you should be able to) should things go wrong however, manually flying an approach down over the water at night with no or minimal references is asking for trouble...so why do it? MHO
Cheers