Re: It's no fun swimming unexpectedly in rough water

A minor point. I don't know where people have apparently got this idea
that racing shells won't sink. Footage of the 1978 boat race is shown
pretty much every year, often repeatedly, around boat race time and
during the pre-race analysis the question of sinking conditions always
comes up.


Carl Douglas wrote:
Paul wrote:
Carl

While Michael is clearly an idiot, he does make a valid point about
risk compensation.

I hope that nowhere have I called Michael that? His being so very wrong
does not indicate mental enfeeblement, just a need to do a bit of study
before he next pretends expertise.

Oddly enough, in both the Blockley & Farooq cases, as in every other
unnecessary rowing fatality until the last year, there has never been
any suggestion that the families of the victims might sue either the
equipment manufacturers or the relevant authorities. However, in the
Blockley case we did have the ARA spreading the word that poor little
them were about to be sued - just as a diving footballer tries to get an
effective opponent red-carded, & with the same lack of any moral integrity.

With regard to the suggestion that being in a buoyant boat makes you
more prone to take risks:
That was another of the unfounded arguments for continued inertia
advanced to the press & ARA Council by Tommy Thomson when the ARA found
itself under growing pressure to quit the blame game & simply obey its
own Water Safety Code by promptly addressing the lack of inherent
buoyancy - which was the only reason that swampings led to sinkings.

Oddly enough, it has always come as a shocking surprise to rowers to
discover on a rough day that their boat would nolonger support them.
Rowers have in general held to the naive assumption, as indicated so
powerfully by Michael, that rowing is perfectly safe as long as you "do
the right things", coupled with frank disbelief that a boat could
actually sink in a modest chop, or that this might cause their death.
That belief was quite deliberately fostered by UK rowing's senior
administrators, who shunned repeated warnings &, incredibly but it is
true, even went so far in 1998 as to delete from official water safety
literature the previously existing references to the possibility of
shells sinking when swamped.

Similarly, there never was any advice in official literature to "stay
with the boat".

In short, rowers were left with the assumption that rowing was perfectly
safe, generating the most casual & dangerously naive attitudes towards
safety of the kind to which I think you & Michael refer.

What the shell buoyancy campaign has achieved, inter alia, is a better
level of rower awareness of the fallibility of their equipment & how
easily water can turn from benign to plain deadly. That was long
overdue, because rowers in general had exhibited pathetically low levels
of water savvy, tending to treat boats as mere extensions of ergometers
& ignoring all safety advice, coupled dangerously with touching levels
of belief in their own abilities to handle whatever came their way.

So the objective is to end up not only with safer equipment but with
much greater levels of awareness. At the moment that is how it is
moving - although it seems from the tone & content of his postings that
Michael has quite a bit of catching up to do.


The reason the Titanic sunk is arguably that it was steaming too fast
in an ice field because its captain believed it unsinkable.

With respect, I doubt that any responsible captain willingly risks even
bending, let along sinking, his brand new, shiny ship, any more than
you'd want to bend a boat you need to race in next week. Titanic's
captain was, however, under certain performance pressures from his
company which may have clouded his judgement. That underlines the folly
of those who make the rules but do not play the game &, normally, do not
face the physical dangers, nonetheless dictating safety policy for
others with flagrant disregard for sound safety expertise. Thus Titanic
was, for commercial reasons, grossly underprovided with lifeboats &
that, as much as anything, sealed the fates of so many.

All so reminiscent of shipowners conduct towards Samuel Plimsoll - at a
time when for a merchantman's crew to refuse to put to sea in a plainly
unsafe ship meant their (the crew's) automatic imprisonment. We today
enjoy some very hard-won freedoms, yet similarly antediluvian &
authoritarian attitudes towards unnecessary & preventable risks still
intrude.

When full
buoyancy in racing shells becomes compulsory (which is inevitable)
people that run head races in particular, need to be careful that they
do not let races go ahead in bad conditions, which in the past they
would have abandoned, because they know the boats won't sink even if
the conditions worsen. Would some of the tideway heads cancelled in
recent years have been allowed to go ahead if the organisers knew all
the boats were fully buoyant and could not sink, with possibly dire
consequences?

That is an excellent question. Unfortunately one cannot prevent human
foolishness, any more than one can perfectly judge how weather
conditions may turn in the next hour or so. I'd suggest that too many
races have been run over the last century in underbuoyant shells with
all the appearance of it having been assumed that the boats were
unsinkable, so I doubt that attitudes can change for the worse.
However, affluent societies like ours do become more litigious so be
concerned that, unless we get our act firmly together in advance, the
law may step in & impede even safe events & activities.

That said, the principal risk remains that of the training outing, where
there is less preparation, less safety cover & no one else around to
help in a sticky situation.

Cheers -
Carl
--
Carl Douglas Racing Shells -
Fine Small-Boats/AeRoWing low-drag Riggers/Advanced Accessories
Write: The Boathouse, Timsway, Chertsey Lane, Staines TW18 3JY, UK
Email: carl@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Tel: +44(0)1784-456344 Fax: -466550
URLs: www.carldouglas.co.uk (boats) & www.aerowing.co.uk (riggers)

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