Sunday Times reporter chartered from Sailing Holidays with no experience. Mad?

[prv]

Wow. I did thirty years and only came off twice and lived to tell the tale.
Mind, there was that time I came round, on my back and concussed in a field of sprouts with the master slapping my face ! ;-)

My mum only rode horses regularly for a few years, but both her front teeth are false ones thanks to being kicked in the face when half a ton of stupid herbivore got scared by a binbag in a hedge.

Back when I used to dive, the point was sometimes made that diving didn't even appear on the list of top ten dangerous sports (though I've no idea what the definition of danger used was). I do remember that horse-riding was number one; motorsport and rugby were there somewhere too.

Pete

 

[prv]

If all you worry about is her death then the statistics support you. If you are also worried about injury, they don't, as far as I can see.

I guess it's probably quite hard to have a non-fatal injury in BASE-jumping. Either the jump goes as planned and you land safely, or you collide with the building / parachute doesn't open, and you die.

Pete

 

[jimi]

My mum only rode horses regularly for a few years, but both her front teeth are false ones thanks to being kicked in the face when half a ton of stupid herbivore got scared by a binbag in a hedge.

Back when I used to dive, the point was sometimes made that diving didn't even appear on the list of top ten dangerous sports (though I've no idea what the definition of danger used was). I do remember that horse-riding was number one; motorsport and rugby were there somewhere too.

Pete

Running must rank very high on the list of dangerous sports .. every runner I know is hobbling from injury to injury ;-)

Bit of commonsense is required!


Back to original point, I think the introduction to sailing via a flotilla holioday when one has never sailed before is a terrific (and safe) introduction to sailing. Much better than providing ballast on someone's windward toerail!

 

[JumbleDuck]

My mum only rode horses regularly for a few years, but both her front teeth are false ones thanks to being kicked in the face when half a ton of stupid herbivore got scared by a binbag in a hedge.

But she's wasn't killed, so it must be safe.

 

[JumbleDuck]

I guess it's probably quite hard to have a non-fatal injury in BASE-jumping. Either the jump goes as planned and you land safely, or you collide with the building / parachute doesn't open, and you die.

I wondered about that. There are an awful lot of injuries in normal parachute jumping, but mostly, I believe, in the raise-money-for-charity commercial area, with lots of untrained people doing their first and last jumps. I would expect BASE jumpers to be on the whole much more experienced, so yes, dead or fine are probably the alternatives. Which is what makes it so hard to compare with something like horseriding or sailing which offers a range of options from minor contusion through brain damage to death. Which in turn means that it is not possible simply to dismiss the list posted without some knowledge of exactly what criteria were used to do the ranking.

 

[JumbleDuck]

Back to original point, I think the introduction to sailing via a flotilla holioday when one has never sailed before is a terrific (and safe) introduction to sailing. Much better than providing ballast on someone's windward toerail!

Absolutely. Couldn't agree more.

 

[jimi]

But she's wasn't killed, so it must be safe.

As a scientist and specialist in applied mathematics you obviously know that safety and danger are not binary concepts.


There's a heck of a difference between losing two front teeth and losing yer life.

Neither getting kicked in the face by a horse , or hitting the ground from 180ft with a wrapped chute is safe, but the latter tends to be rather more dangerous than the former on most occasions.

 

[TangaraToo]

If we accept the published figure of 1 serious injury every 350 hours and assume that a modest level of participation would be one hour per week,

That's far too low for normal participation. Up to a few month ago I spent an average 15 hours a week in the saddle.
When all is said and done you have to define how you class dangerous for the stats. If you decide total serious injuries / death through the sport then yep, riding would come out high as a lot of folks do it. If you look at serious injury/death divided by number of hours participating I would guess base jumping would be somewhat higher on the list.
Then again if you are going to use the general category of horse riding as a base then it should be compared to all activities that use a parachute. Stats again would be different.
Further you could split out eventing vs base jumping and the stats would look very different again.
Oh and I would love to be able to spend 350 hours in the saddle for just 1 injury. I used to event and train young horses. Very risky!

 

[Tranona]

It has always been difficult to define a unit of measure for comparative studies and even more difficult when the activities being compared are so disparate.

Sailing is not the same everywhere and not all types of sailing are the same. There are clearly some on here who see sailing from a challenge the elements perspective and seem to have no concept of the type of sailing required for a 2 week drift from taverna to taverna in the benign Ionian.

Note that nobody offers flotilla type holidays in the UK as the conditions are just not suitable, so what aUK based yottie session as potentially dangerous are just not relevant.

 

[JumbleDuck]

As a scientist and specialist in applied mathematics you obviously know that safety and danger are not binary concepts.

That has been my point, thank you!

 

[JumbleDuck]

That's far too low for normal participation. Up to a few month ago I spent an average 15 hours a week in the saddle. ...
Oh and I would love to be able to spend 350 hours in the saddle for just 1 injury. I used to event and train young horses. Very risky!

I'm genuinely puzzled. When you say "far too low" do you mean that you think there are fewer accidents (as the first bit suggests) or more (as the second). My guess, for what it's worth, is that the risk will be very unevenly spread over participants, so that someone riding 15 hours per week may well be less at risk than someone doing 1 hour per week.

I used to fly gliders, for which accident reports are printed in Sailplane and Gliding magazine. They try to find a cause for each accident, like "Field landing error" or "Instructor failed to take over in time" but I reckoned that in at least 80% of cases the underlying cause was "sheer bloody stupidity" and that I could therefore substantially reduce my own risk by trying not to be bloody stupid.

I think the same goes for sailing too. There are always unpredictable misfortunes, but sheer bloody stupidity is right up at the top of the list, and certainly accounts for every time I've been significantly at risk so far. Well, not counting a forecast SE3 which turned out to be NW6, and even then I should have had a Plan C.

 

[TangaraToo]

I'm genuinely puzzled. When you say "far too low" do you mean that

I meant 1 hour a week riding was far too low given the hours I and the people I know spend in the saddle. Like you I spent many years flying gliders (and instructing). Of all the accidents I witnessed, only one could be put down to anything other than stupidity and that was a heart attack.

 

[BrianH]

Fatality rate is one in sixty participants, I doubt if horseriding approaches that.

http://www.blincmagazine.com/forum/wiki/Fatality_Statistics

I live where the local news regularly reports the latest fatalities at Lauterbrunnen, when the season starts, so I could be biased. Some relevant excerpts:

BASE jumping is one of the world’s most dangerous recreational activities. The nature of BASE jumping is that many of the statistics about this sport have to be taken with a grain of salt. No one keeps records on the many jumps that happen at night, in the boondocks or with no one else around. However, the current BASE number is above 1,800, and the World BASE Fatality List reached 97 on Feb 6, 2013."​

http://base-jumping.eu/base-jumping-fatality-list/​

The following 2011 Spiegel article is well out of date as numbers surged over the last two years with some multiple deaths within days of each other on a number of occasions in 2014:

The Swiss village of Lauterbrunnen is a magnet for thrill seekers looking to take part in the dangerous extreme sport of BASE jumping. In high season, they can be seen plummeting down through the air every minute or so. But a series of deaths has outraged locals.

The village is a mecca for BASE jumpers. Enormous rock walls soar vertically at heights of up to 1,100 meters. Extreme sports fans come from around the world to enjoy the ultimate high, and there were around 15,000 jumps in Lauterbrunnen last year.

Many locals, however, are not happy about the visitors. Some 28 BASE jumpers have already died in Lauterbrunnen, including a French jumper who fell to his death in June after his parachute failed to open. For the local residents, the BASE jumpers are a plague from the sky.

Dominik Loyen is originally from the town of Viersen in the Lower Rhine region, but has lived in Lauterbrunnen for the past six years. In Germany, he needs a permit for every jump, and the jump points and landing areas must be approved. But in Switzerland, no approval is needed from the authorities. "Everyone is responsible for themselves," he says. "The cliffs belong to everyone."
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/base-jumping-in-switzerland-village-appalled-by-thrill-seekers-deaths-a-784896.html​

Imogen Foulkes reports for the BBC:

Adolf von Allmen has seen plenty of accidents, and has come to the conclusion that it's not up to him to worry about it. "I'm really trying not to let it bother me," he said. "When I see how the jumpers deal with it - their friend dies in the morning, they are back jumping in the afternoon. So I'm beginning to think my grief for them is inappropriate." Nevertheless, four deaths in a single week in April have raised questions about whether base jumping, and wingsuit diving from planes, should be better regulated.

In many countries base jumping is forbidden, but in Switzerland the sport is only loosely regulated through a series of recommendations developed between the Swiss Federal Aviation Office and the Swiss Base Association. Jumpers are supposed to have a skydiving licence, and they are advised to complete at least 200 dives before they attempt base jumping. It is also recommended that they have insurance, and, in Lauterbrunnen, they are supposed to buy a "landing card" (costing $25 a year), which compensates local farmers for the damage done to pastures during landing. In practice, such recommendations are very difficult to enforce, because there is really nothing to stop anyone taking the short trip up to the cliff edge and jumping off.​

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27785731​

 

[Matelot Joe]

That's far too low for normal participation. Up to a few month ago I spent an average 15 hours a week in the saddle.
When all is said and done you have to define how you class dangerous for the stats. If you decide total serious injuries / death through the sport then yep, riding would come out high as a lot of folks do it. If you look at serious injury/death divided by number of hours participating I would guess base jumping would be somewhat higher on the list.
Then again if you are going to use the general category of horse riding as a base then it should be compared to all activities that use a parachute. Stats again would be different.
Further you could split out eventing vs base jumping and the stats would look very different again.
Oh and I would love to be able to spend 350 hours in the saddle for just 1 injury. I used to event and train young horses. Very risky!

Bloody Hell, It sounds like the whole of the British Horse Society is in the room. I never thought the day would come, were I would not put a leg across a horse - strange life.

 

[Duster]

I disagree. Sailing is safe if you know what you are doing. If you don't, there's all kinds of room for ropes around props, booms in faces, rope burned hands, hands in winches, gas explosions, feet in windlasses, people in water, port/stbd collisions, hitting the bricks, driving on the wrong side of the road, damage to your boat and everyone else's.

Yea, pretty much anyone can get from A2B but they won't be "safe" without experience.

What a miserable whining attitude, it's dismal jimmys like you that brought about todays ridiculous Health and Safety culture, trying to prevent anyone doing anything.

 

[JumbleDuck]

I meant 1 hour a week riding was far too low given the hours I and the people I know spend in the saddle. Like you I spent many years flying gliders (and instructing). Of all the accidents I witnessed, only one could be put down to anything other than stupidity and that was a heart attack.

Ah right, i see. I was thinking of the people who go riding once a week as typical, but it's not a world I know much about, though my other half had a pony when young and spent huge amounts of time in the saddle.

Most gliding fatalities when I was flying seemed to be in-air heart attacks, with a smattering of tug upsets and spins off the winch. It will be interesting to see whether the new EASA medical requirements improve things ... I knew a lot of elderly pilots who flew gliders because they couldn't pass a CAA medical.

 

[JumbleDuck]

The village is a mecca for BASE jumpers. Enormous rock walls soar vertically at heights of up to 1,100 meters. Extreme sports fans come from around the world to enjoy the ultimate high, and there were around 15,000 jumps in Lauterbrunnen last year.

I don't really have a feel for how many BASE jumpers there are ... any idea?

In a bad year about 5 people die in gliders in the UK, mostly by having heart attacks while flying. The one year I flew in the French Alps they had had 47 fatalities there already that year. The driveway into the centre at St Aubin had a selection of mangled remains of aircraft displayed along it, as an incentive. As a novice mountain pilot I never flew below hilltop height, but regularly saw locals thermalling up cliff faces in rough conditions with less than half a wingspan clearance from the rock. Eek.

Comparatively, I think Dylan is spot on. Sailing is safe, though I would add the caveat "if you are reasonably sensible".

 

[capnsensible]

Comparatively, I think Dylan is spot on. Sailing is safe, though I would add the caveat "if you are reasonably sensible".

:encouragement:

 

[BrianH]

I don't really have a feel for how many BASE jumpers there are ... any idea?

Less than 2000 officially. That means they have qualified by having made at least one jump from each of the four categories.

From BASENumbers.org :

 

[JumbleDuck]

Less than 2000 officially. That means they have qualified by having made at least one jump from each of the four categories.

Coo, not many. On the other hand, I presume the fatalities listed include people who had not yet ticked all four boxes.