Sunsail Court Case

They do have very high quality rescue cover and with the water at about 24 deg C and everyone in bouyancys aids it couldn't be much safer.

This Sunsail thing is a tragic accident and I am sure we all feel for the families loss; but a full life is not without risk and I'd hate to see our sport legislated to a point where we are not able to enjoy sailing.

regards,

Rick

Thanks for the insight, and you are brave to put it in your own name on a public forum. Don't take the rest of what I'm about to say as personal; it is a general point I want to make.

"the way things were run was an accident waiting to happen. Kids club staff without being even RYA lvl 2 were taking young kids out in F6 in hobie 15's regularly and a few did pitchpole them. Trapezing off the leeward side was frequent. There were no knives or any kind of first aid equipment in the safety boats either and mast floats were not fitted to most of the cats."

"I regularly was in charge of safety, it could easily have been me. I don't think any of the staff did anything wrong."

Anything strike you as inconsistent about those two statements?

What did the staff do to get things changed? Ultimately, if you were in charge of safety and you couldn't get things changed, did you quit and say why, clearly and up the management line? Ultimately, sometimes doing that is part of what being a professional is about.

I realise that Sunsail and similar companies pay not a lot of money to staff who are primarily there to enjoy a season by the water in the sun. They are obviously not the people who run the company. Nevertheless, it is easy to blame remote management, and it is equally easy for management to blame the staff on the ground. I suspect that if this had happened in the UK, both groups would have found themselves in court.  

Not quite that simple in my mind.  Sunsail at the time and I suspect still do not have any form of Functional safety management.  The clue to whose fault this is lies in the title.  Unless a company adopts a proactive approach to ensuring it operates safely it will simple keep closing the door after the horse has bolted.  I wonder how many sailing centres keep occurrance logs and do trend analysis to intercept accident chains before they occur?  How many near misses occurred in the company prior to this incident.  If Sunsails management team were on top of this they would have been able to spot potential problems coming by sharing data across thier centres.  It is not the job of the beachfront staff to set policy.  Once policy is in place they form the most inportant part of it's implemetation but to ask an young person with little experience in the field to formulate their own policy possible is frankly rissable and constitutes a shocking abdication of responsibilty.  This doesn't absolve them of any moral responsibility but if following a few near misses sunsails management had issued instructions not to allowing trapezing off the leeward hull, etc etc, they would known the dangers and been able to do their best to mitgate them.

Its a culture thing!

I take your point. When I say "in change of safety" our role was to co-ordinate saftey via radio and conduct hull/board counts each hr.

The staff and I repeatedly complained about the state of things to our manager but his hands were tied. He gets his budget and rules to run the centre from the head office and he did an excellent job given the limitations that were imposed on him, there was nothing he could do. As staff we did the best job we could.

Quitting would require loss of a bonus in excess for £1000 (for full season staff) plus paying for a flight back the UK. When you are getting paid (we worked this out) £0.80/hr (excluding socialising), and are required to socialise each night with guests and buy drinks at UK prices, you are lucky to make it out with any money at all. Losing £1200 is not an attractive prospect if you are broke!

There is a procedures manual but this only contains the 'sunsail way' of righting each of the dinghies, which of course had 2 people in the rib in each photograph. This was never the case since there were not enough staff. We each came up with our own methods to cope with this, hence the newspaper report saying the guy on safety who attended the capsize needed to radio for assistance.

I should point out that the sitation is FAR better in low season since we actually have time to maintain the kit, safety boats, and have adaquate safety cover. High season is just chaos every day, how the guests do not see this I'll never know! Half the hobie cats had tape over holes in the hulls and sent out each day for months and just drained out each day. There was no time to do a repair.