posted 01-20-2003 05:37 PM ET (US)            

You made a very good point.
I have never taught my wife how to start and run the boat.
Looks like the first time out next spring will be a driving lesson.

posted 01-20-2003 07:29 PM ET (US)            

I carry a cell phone, "file" a float plan, wear a PFD and keep the lanyard on when underway.

If my time sneaks up on me, I can't think of a better place to go than on the water in my Montauk, but I don't intend to hurry it.

posted 01-20-2003 07:42 PM ET (US)            

One thing that I worry about when having people aboard, is that if something should go wrong, what do you do first. That's the main reason what I think of.

It is dangerous when you are out by yourself by a long shot. Not just that if something goes wrong, what do I do?/! I mean its one thing watching for other boats and things in the water ahead of you. It really rushes through your mind.

Please be thankful that you are safe and sound on the water because its only 1 life god gives you.

posted 01-20-2003 08:43 PM ET (US)            

How many of you have seen parents bicylcing with a kid in a kid seat on the back of the bike? The kid usually has a helmet on, often the parents DON'T! What happens if they crash? The parent get knocked out and can't help the kid. But biking is safe. Car accidents? Seat belts? Last week a co-worker slipped on ice in his driveway and broke his leg in 3 places. Maybe he should have stayed in bed!

I taught sailing years ago in 26'-41' sloops, yawls and cutters on Eastern Long Island. I taugh families, couples, individuals, etc, a 5-day course that got the group familiar with the boat and would enable them to charter on their own at a later date (navigation, seamanship, rules of the road, sailing, etc). On a hot day I always invited them to go swimming. We'd drift and I'd tell them all to jump over while I got the ladder out. After they swam for a bit they would ask for the ladder. I'd hold off putting the ladder out and while they were treading water I'd ask, "Suppose there was no ladder, what would you do?" Many tried to jump and grab the rail, only one made it in 4 summers. I tried it myself, during my college years, I was in good shape, and I COULD do it. It was a great lesson for all. We expanded it to how would a wife get her husband aboard? Block & tackle, main halyard, etc.

The point is that you have to think before you do something. Go boating by myself in bad weather? Why? I can go hiking. Take a leak over the side while the boat is in gear? What's the risk? Supposedly CG records show that 75% of males falling overboard had their flies open (taking a leak). I never saw it in writing though.

Take the necessary precautions (many of you have good suggestions and PRACTICES), use your head, and enjoy boating. One big thing you want to do is identify the chain of events leading to disaster and break it.

posted 01-20-2003 09:12 PM ET (US)            

Amen to that!

posted 01-21-2003 08:42 AM ET (US)            

Job one is staying on the boat. I teach a woman's safety seminar at (the men know everything) our owner rendezvous and the item that gets everyone's attention is a whistle. I have one in my pocket at all times and I give them out to everyone who comes aboard my boat. In an emergency that whistle might just get someone attention.

posted 01-21-2003 07:59 PM ET (US)            

NEVER SCARED, you hit it on the head about the buddy. A particularly annoying scenerio along with, "I forgot my jacket" and "Hope I don't get seasick this time", and "This is my brother-in-law Frank and his cousin. Is it o.k.?"

But, for pure soul cleansing, nothing beats a long day alone in your Whaler getting a full Rx of sun and spray. Certainly I'm partial, but I've never been in a boat that handled like a Montauk. So light and maneuverable, it feels like I'm on a motorcycle. And to feel it jump and dance over the glassy early morning swell as the sun peeks over the horizon, well, another body would only muddy the picture.

posted 01-21-2003 10:05 PM ET (US)            

I purchased a larger boat last Oct. that my wife and I will be using next summer, I have ordered two of the inflatable waist life vests from Wests that Ed was speaking of.

Dan

posted 01-24-2003 01:56 AM ET (US)            

I boat alone very often, both when my boat is moored and trailered. I fish commercially out of a 17 Alert/Montauk, and many fishing techniques just allow one angler. All of the commercials on my dock also fish solo. I have two kids and a wife, and I don't plan to leave them any sooner than I must. On my boat, everything is in it's proper place to minimize tripping. There is no one in the way of a grab rail. I know there isn't a bucket where I want to step. The gaff is where I left it. The two instances where I almost fell overboard there were with people on board. (knock knock)

Now, as to kill-switches. I believe in them 100%. My best friend and another buddy were killed because he didn't wear his. Of all the designs I see, only the Merc makes sense to me. It uses a simple toggle switch, so if I am tossed overboard with someone else on board, all they have to do is flip the switch, restart the motor, and come and get me. With my other Yamaha or an OMC, you must have a spare lanyard to reset the system. I had a buddy almost ruin a fishing trip when his lanyard blew out of his boat while trailering to a distant lake. He had to wrap fishing line around the switch to hold it open so the motor would run. How would it feel seeing the wind push your boat and helpless buddy away as he cranks the motor til your battery dies with the lanyard clipped on to your vest. OUCH!

May we all have a safe New Year.

posted 01-24-2003 02:51 AM ET (US)         

One of my high school friends is now a parter and founder of a very prominent Chicago law firm, actually one floor above my office, who specializes in insurance defense work.

In the early 80's, he was hired by Mercury's insurance carrier to defend a products liability lawsuit against Mercury, for a situation where a person fell out his small, Mercury outboard powered alum boat, with a lower HP engine on it, and the boat kept running at full throttle around and around in circles, finally killing him in the water. The claim was that an engine manufacturer should have known that under these circumstances a boat/engine could become a missle and injure/kill someone, and that design steps should have been taken to prevent this. The case was settled for several million in damages and Mercury agreed to install the lanyard kill switches as standard equipment on all engines in the late 80's, to avoid future liability claims like this one. The real reason for them was not falling out of a boat while slow trolling, usually occupant carelessness not resulting in Mercury's liability, but for falling out at speed or acceleration, where boats, because of propeller torque and no one at the wheel/tiller, tend to counterclockwise circle back on the victim continuously, often at high speed, running them over while wildly out of control and impossible to stop.

posted 01-24-2003 08:03 AM ET (US)            

It runs with the lanyard in. It runs with the
lanyard out. But the transition from lanyard
in to lanyard out kills the motor. So if I
have the lanyard in and attached and I fall
overboard, the engine gets killed, and my
passenger can start it right up. No switch
to reset, no lanyard to connect. I think
that's even better than the Mercury system
you described.

posted 01-24-2003 01:31 PM ET (US)            

As far as fancy equipment, I get the sense that everyone would love a waterproof cell phone (under 50 buck would be nice)! I would!

I also believe in the little Mini 3's units... they work great and are small enough that all crew can wear them without any hassle...

A lot of racing sauling crews use them to recover MOB, its better than relying on any government or private rescue sevice. And the MOB doesn't have to be active in the search other than to trigger the unit. Crew can be picked up easily after losing sight and even after considerable time... key for a silent MOB.

If you haven't looked at these units, below is a web address. On race in bad weather and at night, it maybe the best $120 you can spend to save your life. The finder unit is $$ but so is telling the CG that you've lost someone.

Not that I don't support the CG or local Sherrif... but I don't. I never want to be in a position where my life depended on someone I didn't know. Several years ago, while in Calatina, a buddy fall back into his engine fly wheel - dumbhead was fixing his engine on his dingy on the water - he was pretty messed up and in peril. A neighbouring boat called the LA County sherriff, lifeguard, and CG etc... They ended up finding a fast power boat and transported him themselves to Long Beach after listening to all the confusion about who and when people were responding. It was a little eye opening.

I think our gallent people in uniform do great work... but I always consider them to be Plan B or C.

Cheers
Ian

posted 02-01-2003 11:44 AM ET (US)         

I tend to go a bit slower than normal.
Its my quiet and peaceful time.
I enjoy it especially on a weekday when there are no crowds at the launch ramp and hardly any boaters are out.

I fish the monterey bay and the san francisco area.

posted 02-01-2003 01:48 PM ET (US)            

See if you folks can match this stupidity:
Many years ago, when I was nineteen, I crewed on a 38 ft French cutter from Toulon to Beirut, then thru the Suez canal and down the Red Sea to Djoubouti, French Somaliland. There were two others on board, the skipper and his womanfriend. I had a mid-day watch -- the two others were below sleeping or doing whatever strange things the French are wont to do, night or day, the barbarians -- and it was hot as hell 50 or 60 miles south-east of Port Sudan. We were ghosting along downwind, light breeze, calm seas, making four or five knots at most, jib furled, stays'l boomed out to port and main to starboard, with our rudimentary self-steering device needing adjustment (thank the gods!) every fifteen minutes or so. Being even more foolish than I am now, I decided to cool off by taking a little dip. Cleverly, I tied a bowline around my waist and made the bitter end of the 20-foot half-inch mooring line fast to a cleat, then jumped off the transom. Well, like lhg, I had been a high school varsity swimmer, had surfed since I was ten, scuba dived, and felt real comfortable in the ocean, so I was surprised and more than a bit annoyed when I found myself immediately waterskiing or wakeboarding on my back, sans skis or board, a cone of water kicked up by my head almost covering my body down to my feet, and totally unable to pull myself even one inch back toward the boat...in fact I was scared shitless. I tell you that there is absolutely no possible chance that a human can swim five or six miles per hour...trust me! I yelled for help as loud as I was able, but there was no way that I could be heard below. After the longest ten minutes of my life, the self-steering allowed the boat to head up into the wind, the sails flapped wildly, and the skipper, naked as a oiseau, came charging on deck. He told me later, after he had hauled me aboard and cursed me out in half a dozen languages for half an hour, that when he came on deck and didn't see me, he was sure I had gone overboard some unknown time before, and was lost.

The moral: kill switch/lanyard must be used with harness if boating alone, and yes, after reading all the helpful submissions in this thread and remembering my little Red Sea adventure, I'm gonna start wearing my vest all (most...) of the time.

Ah, to be an adolescent again and immortal, albeit stupid as hell. What did Oscar Wilde say..."Youth is wonderful; too bad it's wasted on the young."

Tony

posted 02-01-2003 03:41 PM ET (US)            

Let me contribute a safety at sea story to the thread.

I used to be very active in a sailing club. Safety was a constant concern. Like many things designed by committee, the stern rail of our larger sailboats were packed with all kinds of safety gear. Every time someone suggested adding more safety gear there'd never be anyone bold enough to object. We had a throwable horse shoe collar back there. We had a ten-foot long man overboard pool with a ballasted weight and a flag. We had the life-sling system mounted back there.

In fact there was so much safety gear hanging off the stern railing that it was very difficult to use the swim ladder. You could barely get back on board from the water via the stern ladder because there was so much safety gear in the way. That is not to mention the grill that was usually mounted back there, too, as well as an small outboard motor bracket for storing the dingy's engine.

One afternoon three or four of us were out in Lake Erie on what was supposed to be a "training" mission. I proposed we test the Life-Sling system for recovery of a man overboard. The seas were calm and there was hardly any wind. The lake was too cold for anyone to actually be the man overboard (MOB), so we tossed the horse shoe buoy into the lake to mark the spot.

For those unfamiliar with the life sling system, it consists of a floatation collar attached to about 100-feet of polypropylene (floating) line. The recovery technique calls for the collar to be deployed astern and the boat to sail a course such that the line trails behind the boat and comes within reach of the MOB.

We followed the instructions, sailing the boat into a slow turn and heading back to our MOB spot. I think we missed the MOB on our first attempt. On the next pass, we managed to sail over the floating line. Oops.

Now we had a problem. The line was stuck under the boat. Fortunately, it missed the propeller, but it did get jammed into the small aperture between the rudder post and a vestigial skeg.

We were afraid to run the engine since we didn't want to wrap this line in the propeller, but we could not get it off the rudder post.

The line was actually spliced from polypropylene to nylon line at the tail end, a good feature since the nylon line was much easier to cleat. Polypropylene has a tendency to unravel itself from a cleat, and that could be a problem in a rescue situation.

Ironically, what was jammed into the rudder post was the splice between the poly and the nylon. It was just enough thicker to not be able to pass through the gap.

To make a long story shorter, we ended up having to send a crew overboard to cut the line out of the rudder, a rather chilly duty that afternoon. He hacked off the poly-nylon splice and we recovered the rest of the line. After this one test usage on a perfectly calm day, we never did get a nylon tail spliced back onto the polypropylene. That made it extremely hard to use the life sling since you could hardly tie a knot in the bitter end that would last for more than 30-seconds before jumping out.

On that training day mission we never even got around to dropping our main, rigging this elaborate block and tackle system to the halyard and trying to hoist a 200-lb adult over the life lines. That sounded so scary no one wanted to try it.

It was a sobering lesson. Having just spent $400 for this safety device, we saw how hard it was in even ideal conditions to use it with good effect. Ever since then my rule to guests on board is "don't fall overboard."

posted 02-01-2003 09:14 PM ET (US)            

More than once, I've neglected to install the working end of the lanyard, and sat there turning the engine over and over while thinking "It's never this hard to start, What's up with the engine today?" Imagine the feeling of stupidity when I recognize the working end of the lanyard is lying on the deck, detached from the kill switch!

Of course, my reply to anyone else in the boat is always "Hmmm, Kill Switch Still Works! Now we'll see if it starts with it attached".