General Safety

so many good ideas have come up in the past few weeks.
Thanks guys for everyones efforts, links, experiences etc. , I think its been sailing SB at its best that its been for a long time.

My safety tip, dont panic.
Easy to say for sure, and especially on the boat when a few little things begin to go wrong, and it seems to snowball into a comedy of errors.

Like dropping the boat hook, in then running over the mooring line, which gets caught between your port rudder and the hull, then your hanging downwind by the rudder, the dingy gets wedged under the bridgedeck, the prodder bridle then snags an oarblade and flicks it out of the rowlock, and balances it on the thwart etc etc
(some or all of the above may or may not have happened)

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tarquin1 said..
Flame/heat retardant glove in with the flares. A course I was on( yes they are good) we were setting off hand held flares. When one person was letting his flare off a red hot spark dropped onto his hand. He dropped the flare. The instructor said great now your boats on fire or there is a hole in your life raft. Who wants a glove. We have a welders glove that goes half way down your forearm.

Yep gloves in the flare box safety specs also, i was shown to ignite the flare holding it under hand so it's impossible to look down its barrel in the moments before full ignition.
Hydrostatic self inflating pfd makes sense if you get a whack on the head on the way overboard
great thread !

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tarquin1 said..
www.maritimenz.govt.nz/commercial/safety/accidents-reporting/accident-reports/documents/Platino-mnz-accident-report-2016.pdf

I will transfer this over from another thread. Long but skim through it. Lots of good info.
From loads on turning blocks and what went wrong and advice on what to do or how to use safety equipment

G'day Tarquin,
Just wanted to post an update. I managed to find the marine expert that provided the technical analysis for the report, I was lucky to get some time with them and ask about specifics from the report and the relevance to my own boat. It was pretty sobering, and I came away from it with some must do's for my own sailing.

I had the perfect environ to implement and try some of these changes as we were heading offshore for a couple of days racing last weekend.
I was excited and I was hoping to graft these ideas into our routine, but in reality the biggest change that occurred was none of these ideas, it was me.

I won't bore you with the detail, but an unexpected last minute issue forced me to leave with one crewman short, and it just so happened that crew was my nav. So I had to shuffle the crew around to offset the loss of skills and the extra pair of hands, with some unintended consequences.

The good consequence was the crew all rallied around the last minute changes and made an acceptable showing, and nobody got hurt.
The bad consequence was I became concerned over the safety aspect, which made me think of the Platino, so I lifted my foot of the pedal for the last 50 miles, costing my crew a podium finish. This action alone is not bad per se, even though it felt like it at the time. The bad part was the reason I throttled back was I had not made the effort to do the right training to accommodate the loss of an important crew position, and it became apparent when we had some ugly moments. When adrenaline is peaking and your lizard brain is taking over, if you are doing things not in the sequence you are trained in that can lend itself to potential issues. Training on nice sunny days with everyone in their normal position and all the stars have aligned....this is not proper training.

In my defence, I was not in control of the decision to flick the crew member. What was in my control was ensuring I had the right training regime to cover these eventualities. The decision I made was influenced heavily by the above post from Tarquin, reading the report and the resultant chat with the marine expert, I might not have needed to button off, but a tin cup isn't worth becoming the subject in an accident investigation report, and I could not say with all conscience I had done enough to prevent a bad situation from getting worse. Pretty humbling.

So I just wanted to say thanks.
Cheers,
SB