Safety books.."suddenly overboard"

[Catigale]

Reading book on deaths at sea. No Fastnet races, no epic battles with the sea , just a lot of stories of people dying in boating accidents, sometimes at dock. Excellent tuneup for your safety situational awareness.

Personal favourite...keelboat soft grounds, rather than wait for tide, captain wades out into shallows with kedge line, line gets prop wrapped, pulls him under boat, and crew can't cut him loose. Bad ending.

[Russ]

Sounds like a good read for any pleasure boater.

[seahouse]

Your favourite sounds like the modern-day version of keel-hauling.

[gabid]

I read this book by Tom Lochhaas, I found it very educational for me as a new sailor. I was surprised that most accidents/incidents do not happen while sailing but rather at anchor or dock and involve cold waters.

[NiceAft]

I read this book by Tom Lochhaas, I found it very educational for me as a new sailor. I was surprised that most accidents/incidents do not happen while sailing but rather at anchor or dock and involve cold waters.

The sailing equivalent of 52% of most driving accidents occur within five miles of home.

Thanks for the posting Steph. It sounds like a good read.

Ray

[Highlander]

Did u know 50% of boat drowning involving guys had there fly's open

Just saying safer to have a liquid laundry detergent plastic bottle for those occasions u can't leave the helm

J
ps Guess they lost their balance once they dumped their Ballast !!

[mastreb]

The Navy publishes a book called "Naval Lessons Learned"

It's pretty harrowing.

[Catigale]

Matt...can we get into that database (legally, I mean....I know we CAN get into it) of NLL or do you have to be active,

[mastreb]

Matt...can we get into that database (legally, I mean....I know we CAN get into it) of NLL or do you have to be active,

I'm not sure. We had access to it when I was active, but some of the incidents in it are classified CONFIDENTIAL, so there's no way you'd get in without clearance. I googled around a bit looking for redacted publications, but I couldn't find anything. I know there were printed and bound editions of it produced in days gone by, but those may never have been publically released.

I'll poke around and see if I can't find an unclassified old edition somewhere.

[mastreb]

By the way, this book is EXCELLENT. Very hard to read in some cases, but definitely a book every boat operator should read.

89% of boating fatalities were not wearing a PFD. Now, this statistic is not 100% cause-and-effect, because those people who routinely wear a PFD are also probably far more safety conscious in general and less likely to get into a situation in the first place. But still, it's a very meaningful statistic.

One of the most amazing statistics is the fact that 40% of boating fatalities occur at the dock or while docking. What never occurred to me is that you actually should not take your PFD off until you leave the boat--it should remain on any time you're topside whether you're moving or not. A lot of the fatalities in the book simply slipped off at the dock.

Of injuries I've heard of on this forum, slipping off the boat dockside is the #1 injury producer. It's happened to numerous of us including me: I was right in front of two other forum members Vic and Billy (DoubleCross). I luckily somehow wound up with only one leg in the water, other on the dock, and left arm wrapped around a stanchion, but I could have just as easily wound up in the drink with a dislocated shoulder, as happened to C130King. And this is tucked-in-safe at the dock Sunday Morning stuff.

I don't think I'm ready to wear a PFD 24x7 while onboard, but its definitely food for thought. Especially with those damned slippery bandit stripes.

[BOAT]

Number one cause of FATALITY for people involved with trailerable sailboats is striking an electric line with the mast while launching or retrieving the boat according to automobile insurance actuarial tables.

[yukonbob]

I've seen all these on television at one point or another...

The leading cause of water realated deaths is drowning

Drowning is the 3rd leading cause of unintentional death

Suicide is the number one cause of intentional deaths in teenagers today

and dont forget 80% of all statistics are made up on the spot

[Catigale]

The take home is the media focusses on big events like the Cross Michigan race, where experienced people get into trouble in heavy weather, or the SFO scene - where people on big boats might make a series of bad decisions.

For me, one of the scariest in this book was the guy idling up to a dock at night, his buddy on the pulpit handling lines, clear night, no wind/waves...ducked below for something, came up...and his buddy was gone. Body found later. No idea what happened.

We take off our PFDS IN THE CAR. We start boating when we pull up, we end boating when we pull away with boat on trailer.

[mastreb]

Yep, that incident was the scary one for me too, because honestly with a lot of these I don't see myself being that dumb, but losing your balance at the dock, striking your head, and being found under a pylon two hours later by divers could happen to any boater.

We used to take of PFDs after we dropped sail on the way into the marina. With the new boat and after having read this, we take them off only after the boat is secured in the slip and all the line handling is done.

We're also getting inflatable PFDs for everyone and guests. They're a little expensive, but there's a lot less resistance to wearing them and our kids have been fighting over who has to use the bulky ones since we had four inflatables and five people. Our first ones are now 3 years old, so its time for refresh kits for them. We'll have the kids jump in the water with them on so they see exactly how they work, re-pack them without the tablet and CO2 so they see how the PFDs fail and have to be manually inflated, and finally re-pack them with the fresh kits to rejuvenate them.

[BOAT]

One time in San Felipe we beached in the middle of the night because my Dad said the weather was getting too bad and he wanted to take the boat out of the water. I remember being so pi$$ off because dad got me out of bed at 12:30 and it was a moonless pitch black night and only about 40% of the boats had an anchor light up - they were hard to spot in the swells.

While dad worked the OB and tiller I sat in the pulpit and directed looking for anchor lines. When we finally made it to the beach the shore that was normally calm with no discernible wave at all in that bay had developed into little 1 foot breakers. The shore was only sand so we knew the beaching would not hurt the boat even with the little pounding of a 1 foot wave so we stormed the beach.

Once aground I jumped off the bow with the bow line in hand like I had done so many times before expecting to get my ankles wet.

I sunk into the water up to my chest and slipped right under the bow of the boat as it went up on a wave. When the boat came back down it trapped me under water pinned to the sandy bottom and then the next wave rolled over and i was totally under water with the boat on top of me. I have no idea why my dad reversed the outboard at that time because there was no way he could see me, but he did. As the boat went up the next wave it lifted off me and backed away from the beach and I slid out from under the boat. Cold and stunned without time to think I quickly ran with bow line in hand up the beach and held the boat tight to the sand as my dad climbed off the bow onto the beach and walked past me to go get the car and the trailer. He said: "I'll be back as soon as the trailer is in the water - wait here and hold the boat and try not to get wet", and he walked away. Ten minutes later he came back, got on the boat and told me to "cast off and meet me at the ramp". The ramp was only about a 2 minute walk from the beach. I got there, and dad drove the boat onto the trailer and i hooked the winch strap and cranked it up and we pulled it out of the water in nothing flat like we had done so many many times before.

About 2 hours later at 3AM a squall came through and blew out the bay. Several boats broke anchor and were lost that night. By then we were dead asleep in a little Mexican motel made out of cinder-block and did not hear a thing.