Horror Stories & Training

[TheBoatman]

It has occurred to me that most sailing/mobo training courses are borne out of horror stories, both past and present.
In past times anyone going to sea have made mistakes and have horror stories to tell or pass on and from that “training courses” have been developed to pass on valuable experience. I think we would all agree that we always “learn” more from a bad experience that we survived than one that was done without any problems. I am fast coming to the conclusion that listening to other people’s horror stories is a valuable tool in developing good training courses to pass on this info to the wider boating fraternity.

Discuss?


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[powerskipper]

best way I know of passing info on with out lechering, and entertaining too /forums/images/icons/wink.gif

<hr width=100% size=1><A target="_blank" HREF=http://powerskipper.mysite.freeserve.com/>http://powerskipper.mysite.freeserve.com/</A>
Julie

 

[Robin]

I like the idea of 'lechering' personally, do you do private tuition?/forums/images/icons/blush.gif

<hr width=100% size=1><font size=1>Sermons from my pulpit are with tongue firmly in cheek and come with no warranty!</font size=1>

 

[chippie]

I remember seeing an Australian instructional video that showed a huge breaking wave apparently come from nowhere on a smooth sea and a bright sunny day with a disabled yacht drifting towards it.. It gave me the creeps but the message around it was not forgotten.

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[AlexL]

Someone said this to me once and its stuck - basically the message is that its better to learn from other peoples errors - i.e courses and the like.

Knowledge is tripping over a log and falling flat on your face. Wisdom is watching someone else trip over the log, and then stepping over it yourself.

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[Clive_Rigden]

Good point Alex. Life is one long learning exercise and I, for one, learn from my mistakes. Is that why I'm still making so many?

<hr width=100% size=1>Khyber

 

[Landale]

IIRC:

A few gets their learning from books
A few gets their learning from observation.

The rest of us just p** on the electric fence!

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[snowleopard]

quote...

from US military staff appraisals...

"this officer never makes the same mistake twice but it seems to me he has made them all once".

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[mirabriani]

One of the best lecturers I had used to say
"First I'll tell you what I am going to tell you"
"Then I will tell you"
"After that I will tell you what I've told you"

In other words you drove the point home!

Regards Briani

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[CharlesM]

Horror stories can be of value

One of the key points when diving is to never hold your breath. This can be brought home to new divers when I tell the story about a guy who was diving in Dahab, and his girlfriend was snorkling. She dived down the 6 or so meters - took a few breaths from his regulator and then swam back up.

Sounds innoculous enough, but the poor girl did not know about diving and held her breath. Result - her lungs exploded and she died.

I think that drives the point home rather than telling simply telling them not to hold their breath.

Charles

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[Becky]

It goes for books too. I have read Heavy Weather Saling twice now, and it scares me to death. But I do wonder how I will deal with such a situation; I would probably deploy HWMB's bl***y parachute which still occupies most of the floor space of my study. With the life raft (private rant).
But the point, of reading or hearing other peoples disasters is a good way of gaining second-hand experience. There have been comments about all the disasters we read in the yachting press, but who wants to read about a perfect trip? Nothing new there. So keep the horrors coming, it helps those of us who haven't been there yet and hope to keep it that way!

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[billmacfarlane]

The trouble from learning from horror stories is that they happen so seldom in the normal way of things and sometimes in very freakish conditions that there's not anything to learn. The reason yotty mags publish some of these horror stories is got nothing to do with learning but a lot to do with schadenfreude and the fact we all like a bit of a drama. For example PBO ran a series for years on learning from experience. If you totalled all the points up about what each individual learned from the experience and carried out all the check points in the articles you'd never get time to go sailing. Before anyone dismisses me as a cynical old so-and-so, you can learn a limited amount but you're much better to accept the fact that there is a risk in going sailing,albeit a small one statisically, do your basic checks, and accept the fact that Fate might sneak up the leaded pipe to quote PG, and hope you don't appear in a yotty mag writing an article about your own personal horror story.

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[TheBoatman]

Bill
My main aim of the post was to highlight the fact that most, if not all training courses have been set up on the back of horror stories of 1 type or another. I feel it's a shame that so many people on this forum and many more that don't come to this place are so against training? I beleive that there needs to be a balance between training courses and practical experience only then will we turn out genuinely "good" sailors.

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[billmacfarlane]

Surely training courses are set up according to a syllabus e.g Yotmaster etc ?

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[webcraft]

I once bluffed my way into a job as a survey engineer running sophisticated gyroscopes down offshore oilwells. After finding my (often tortuous) way out of 1001 mishaps and misadventures and becoming a pretty good engineer I found I was regularly sent on the jobs most likely to go wrong. After a couple of years I was invited to write the company's (up until then non-existent) field training procedures. The manuals were comprehensive, dealing with scenarios that were eminently preventable or easily dealable with when forewarned and forearmed. Every 'what if' and contingency was based on some nightmare I had faced in the field.

My point is that most good training is on the back of other peoples' mistakes and disasters . . . best practice can only be determined after the exploration of a lot of not so good practice, and this de facto applies to current RYA and other courses.

I don't believe you will ever get old salts who have been sailing for years to undergo any voluntary training. Usually this is because they don't need it, but there is the odd arrogant menace out there, plus a few simple souls who are simply blind to their own failings.

I was lucky - I did some courses when I still had a relatively small number of trips in my log book and am now continuing the learning curve on my own . . . I would encourage anyone near the beginning of their sailing career to take a course (or two) - it kick starts the learning process.

- Nick

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[TheBoatman]

Nick
Perzackerly, exactly what I was trying to get over.

Peter.

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