your responsibilities as a sailor

If we all accept that a BA should be mandatory, then logic would decree that a TH should be banned.

Originally posted by PeterG If we all accept that a BA should be mandatory, then logic would decree that a TH should be banned. The logic does nothing of the sort. A trapeze harness is essential for some types of sailing, and of course people who use them should be aware of the risks. Personally I wouldn't use one without a quick release hook, and as I'm sure you are aware there has been plenty of discussion about that issue. But the notion of banning THs is a completely different issue than saying that wearing BAs, which are not essential to the sport but are generally believed to reduce risk, should be compulsory.

Edited by pondmonkey - 20 May 13 at 3:48pm

so you appease the H&S mob with a blanket rule, that may or may not have much substance given the experiences of sailors who've found acts of self-rescue impinged by PFDs?

Is windsurfing safer than boating though grf? If it all goes wrong on a board the fall falls over and you sit or lie on the board. Nothing stuck up in the air driving you downwind. No pulleys or ropes to snag on, etc, etc.

A boat has a boom that hurts, rigging to get snagged up in, and various other bits of stuff that sick out to impale you on, etc, etc. Also it can blow away from you surprisingly quickly and takes far more effort to get upright.

Not sure how you surmise that the number of fatalities is mostly down to buoyancy aids without any actual statistics, unless of course you have them then I will happily accept your words.

It strikes me that most of the arguments and counter arguments in the latter part of this thread are based on personal opinion rather than facts. If people don't report when a pfd has helped then the results will always be skewed to those luckily rare occasions when something tragic had happened. I suspect that GRFs last paragraph has a lot to do with things, though of course I don't have any facts to back that up....

If you take the recent accident down south west where the family got either hurt or killed by the power boat then a pfd wouldn't have helped our hindered, it was the lack of kill cord that did for them. Still in the official statistics though

I would expect windsurfers to have a fairly low fatality rate, as they seem to spend most of their time on the beach.
I have probably been in a few situations where I could easily have been in trouble had I not been wearing buoyancy. But that does not stop me going afloat without when I think it's reasonable.
I think the entrapment thing is grossly overstated, but it's something people don't think about until they get a big scare. You don't need a trap harness for that, in my experience.

To put it in context I have known a lot more people who've died of cancer, car accidents or futile wars
than the very few I've known very slightly who've died sailing.

 
To get back on topic, yes we have some responsibility to our clubs and the sport in general not to be seen as complete idiots and not to lead kids astray with macho attitudes to LJ's, PFD's, kill cords and what have you. We also have a responsibility to kids to teach them that it's the real world out there and there is more to it than just wearing the favoured safety clobber.
Maybe we should also tell them that its worth the very slight risk?