Sunsail Court Case

Minorca Sailing fit mast head floats to all dinghies as a matter of policy, regardless of the skill level of the crew. It is also the policy at Queen Mary that all hired asymetric boats have a mast head float.

I sail my Laser Vago with a mast head float, it may not be cool, but when sailing solo it is very much safer. The modern asymetric dinghy will turnturtle almost immediately with the kite up, the Laser 2000 loves to invert and after having been caught once underneath it is not something I would wish to repeat.

A 40 litre mast head float on a Hobie cat would have almost certainly given this girl a chance to free herself and most probably would have prevented the inversion.

Quick release harnesses are not the answer, preventing or slowing inversion is.

All this is very worrying.  There's no denying that sailing can, at times, be a dangerous sport but, certainly at my school, most people do not recognise this and it's only when a tragic event like this happens that people start to investigate the safety of the sport.  Although the RYA lay down strict guidelines to holiday resorts and clubs there are still many ways to make sailing a safer sport.  It seems to pass us regular club sailors by exactly how dangerous sending a young girl with practically no sailing experience whatsoever out on a trapezing cat and i think the holiday resorts will have to seriously reconsider thier policies.  What i don't want is the British sports associations to start putting in very strict safety rules that would affect all of our sailing lives.  A person new to my club works as a health and safety advisor and she was horrified that 8 year olds were allowed to go out on the sea alone with no supervision and that children were allowed to hang off the sides of boats on wires that could trap them in a capsize.  I can see from all this new rules coming in like:  "no sailing in above a F5",  "children under 12 have to be accompannied by a responsible adult when sailing", and "no trapezing for children under 18" 

I suggest you read the various links at the beginning of the thread. That doesn't appear to be quite what happened.

Originally posted by Worthy From reading various articles on the issue, it appears to me that the (Greek) law that was broken was that they let under 16s out on a boat unsupervised.

I don't think so. I was there at the time and went back to another Greek Sunsail resort a year later. The only difference was that under 16s needed their parents permission to sail. No one needed any extra supervision.

The rescue cover in that resort at the time was really good too (obviously not quite good enough) but I don't think I have seen any better rescuing anywhere else.

What i can't believe is that none were carrying a knife and they let them out alone. I think that the parents should have asked advice from the instructors about whethere this was a safe idea in the 1st place to let the kids out, one of them being inexperienced, in this sort of boat.