Terrible news from Clipper

petem said:
At what point would you consider the number of deaths in a single year to be unacceptable and a valid reason for stopping the race?
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I think it is not my business. The organisers are responsible people, and the paying customers are adults who can take that decision for themselves. From the risk perspective I would be happy to do it myself and so see no reason why others should not be free to make the same choice.

So far the number of deaths is not disproportionate - I only know of 3 out of the 5000+ plus who have taken part - probably not much different from the death rate of a similar number in UK, and on a per-hour basis much lower than say the London Marathon.

Were that number to go up towards double digits it would make me think twice - but I would still not favour telling others what risks they can and cannot take.
 
The last fatality in the Volvo Ocean Race was in 2006...
The last fatality in the Vendee Globe was in 1997....

Why does this keep happening Clipper? Clearly something is wrong.....
 
dunedin said:
Been quite a few on hot air ballon trips and sky diving
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Good point. I don't know how the stats are now, but at one time commercial skydiving operations were breaking about a leg per flight. Volunteers of a charity I was involved with suggested a sponsored jump, until I asked which one of them didn't mind a month or two in plaster.

Hot air balloon trips are a little different, because they aren't marketed as an adventure activity - more as a "Sip champagne in glorious silence" experience. I've just looked and unfortunately the AAIB lumps balloons in with sport aviation, so it's a little hard to tell what the accident rate for commercial ballooning is these days.
 
bedouin said:
I think it is not my business. The organisers are responsible people, and the paying customers are adults who can take that decision for themselves.
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But are they? How can a complete novice to sailing judge whether an organisations training and safety policy are up to the mark? If I offer to take friends sailing they can accept or decline based on what they know of my character (impetuous/considered? meticulous/slapdash? aggressive/laid-back?) but if I were to offer to take paying customers who were strangers to me they would have none of that knowledge and so there are rules on commercial sailing to reassure them that I am meeting some basic standards.
 
People put their trust in "the professionals". When people come on your/my boat, they put trust in me that my boat is seaworthy and that I know what I'm doing. They have no way of assessing this risk for themselves.

Although these people go through training, they have no idea and no way of knowing what the Southern Ocean is like until they're in it.

A few people have asked me over the years whether I would be up for skippering one, and my response is always that I can't think of anything worse than trying to skipper a boat full of amateurs around the world. all the gold in China wouldn't convinse me to do it (were I asked, which I haven't been).
 
Bobc said:
People put their trust in "the professionals". When people come on your/my boat, they put trust in me that my boat is seaworthy and that I know what I'm doing. They have no way of assessing this risk for themselves.
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Except by thinking something like "Bob's a pretty careful chap, generally, so I expect he's careful at sea too" or "Dear God, I wouldn't get JD drive me to the shops and back, let alone take me out in a boat." Even then it's no more than a general impression by proxy.

Although these people go through training, they have no idea and no way of knowing what the Southern Ocean is like until they're in it.
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I've seen films. It looks ... horrible.

Oh! The Crinan Canal for me,
I don't like the wild raging sea,
It would be too terrific to cross the Pacific,
Or sail to Japan or Fiji.
A life on the Spanish Main,
I think it would drive me insane,
The big foaming breakers would give me the shakers,
The Crinan Canal for me.​
 
bedouin said:
I think it is not my business. The organisers are responsible people, and the paying customers are adults who can take that decision for themselves. From the risk perspective I would be happy to do it myself and so see no reason why others should not be free to make the same choice.

So far the number of deaths is not disproportionate - I only know of 3 out of the 5000+ plus who have taken part - probably not much different from the death rate of a similar number in UK, and on a per-hour basis much lower than say the London Marathon.

Were that number to go up towards double digits it would make me think twice - but I would still not favour telling others what risks they can and cannot take.
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I think that's an excellent and reasonable to view the Clipper challenge as a whole. It has to be taken over the whole history of the challenge. Desperately sad for the family and friends and
for the skipper and crew though. I expect they will have to withdraw the boat.

Each individual has to take on the responsibility of any adventure experience themselves in my view. On the positive side, so much extra confidence and experience to use in life in general is gained from these challenges. I would be very sorry to see the end of these races.
 
thecommander said:
The last fatality in the Volvo Ocean Race was in 2006...
The last fatality in the Vendee Globe was in 1997....

Why does this keep happening Clipper? Clearly something is wrong.....
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It’s a fact of statistics that low probability events tend to have a wide (and often surprising) distribution. It is common to have a large gap between events, and also to have clusters of multiple events in a short time period (even of unrelated events).
Need very large populations to start getting to an even distribution. And neither Volvo nor Vendée are big enough to get such statistical validity. They remain dangerous and will not be complacent - one day a whole boat could sadly be lost.

Also, the Races are in the Southern Ocean for a relatively short period. A few good years can give relatively easy passages. Then every once in a while the fleets will experience a really severe storm when the risks and casualties will suddenly go up (just like Fastnets and Hobart’s).
Fortunately better weather forecasts and, ironically, faster boats mean that there is a better chance of the Volvo and Vendée boats rerouting to avoid the worst pastings. Saw this with the mid-fleet group of the last Vendée, when some very experienced racers slowed down and/or diverted hugely to avoid one severe depression

Very sad news and condolences to the family.
 
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I am pretty ambivalent on this, having been previously in a profession that had its share of risk and action, then settled into civvy street and ordinary life. To make myself feel a little alive again it has always been a risk taking and challenging pursuits, from parachuting, to climbing and many other unwise things inbetween that did it for me. Then life, and making a living take over, and all of a sudden one is middle aged, and bored, in need of another adventure no matter the potential consequences. So we do things that we should know better than to attempt perhaps and there may be an argument that we should be protected from ourselves (more training, medicals, whatever) but fundamentally we should still be able to take our own chances in an informed manner.
I would sooner sign up for an adventure than a tour. I guess that is what these guys offer.
 
It seems to me another 'unnecessary' accident.
Not extreme weather.
Not structural failure of a racing machine.
Not bad luck of hitting an iceberg, whale or flotsam.

More of a failure of basic boatmanship in the conditions to be expected in the area.

I think there is a conceptual problem with the boats. They are deliberately designed with old-skool hank-on sails instead of furling gear and so forth, in order to involve large numbers of crew.
Yet the boats are very powerful and quite fast.
I suspect the teamwork required to operate these machines safely is alien to most people. Most people's day jobs are not like that. Even people who play team sports don't need to work together in the same way. The forces do it, but they have rigid hierarchy and long training to do what's needed without delay or question. On a boat. it's one thing for 2 or 3 people to work together understanding one another's limitations and monitoring what the others are doing. As the numbers go up, the possibilities of mistakes and misunderstanding go up exponentially or worse.
People will make mistakes. With these machines, there is not much margin for getting things wrong between the normal latitude of 'not getting ever last step exactly right' and a potentially serious incident.
If people were bashing around the channel in Sigma 33s they could make mistakes and learn. It's all a bit serious in big fast boats in the real ocean.
I'm not sure I know even ten people I'd care to trust to get things right to that level for days at a time. Possibly some of the real top crews I've met who can do what's needed by second nature, because they've got years of practice behind them.
 
bedouin said:
I think it is not my business. The organisers are responsible people, and the paying customers are adults who can take that decision for themselves. From the risk perspective I would be happy to do it myself and so see no reason why others should not be free to make the same choice..
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Well said. Everyone has a choice of how they want to live their own life.

The usual suspects have piped up from their coastal afternoon sailing armchairs to pontificate over the doom and gloom of other people's life choices.

As stated above these activities will cease when/if people stop doing them - hopefully voluntarily and not enforced by the PC/H&S Brigade.
 
Sailing big boats fast around the world is always going to involve an element of danger, and if it didn't people wouldn't want to do it. I'm not saying ignore this incident, quite rightly the circumstances should be examined and if lessons can be learnt then fine, but lets keep things in perspective. Over three thousand people are killed worldwide on the roads every day, doesn't stop you popping down to the shops though does it?
 
dslittle said:
Well said. Everyone has a choice of how they want to live their own life.
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Of course. But it should be an informed choice.

The usual suspects have piped up from their coastal afternoon sailing armchairs to pontificate over the doom and gloom of other people's life choices.
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Nobody has done that.

As stated above these activities will cease when/if people stop doing them - hopefully voluntarily and not enforced by the PC/H&S Brigade.
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When were "PC" and "H&S" merged? I must have missed the memo, which I presume came from either so-called experts or unelected Brussels bureaucrats.

 
dslittle said:
Well said. Everyone has a choice of how they want to live their own life.

The usual suspects have piped up from their coastal afternoon sailing armchairs to pontificate over the doom and gloom of other people's life choices.

As stated above these activities will cease when/if people stop doing them - hopefully voluntarily and not enforced by the PC/H&S Brigade.
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It's incidents like these which will lead to more regulation.
Safety is not just about regulation, it's also about human factors.

It's not just about the sad loss of someone who died doing what he wanted to do, it's also about his team-mates who've had a fatality on their watch.
That can be a terrible thing to bear. I've seen it do real long term damage to people.
Everything on a boat like this is teamwork and mutual responsibility.

If you want to risk your life, do it on your own, get a motorbike or hang glider.
 
LONG_KEELER said:
Each individual has to take on the responsibility of any adventure experience themselves in my view./QUOTE]

That’s complete rot. As an amateur skipper I take responsibility for the “adventure experience” of all my amateur crew at sea. We’re i a professional skipper- especially one taking a gig which MAIB claims needs professional assistance but nevertheless taking it without- I would feel the responsibility more so. It has ever been thus at sea, in any vessel, and we all know that.
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Taking responsibility for the decision to join an adventure is not the same as taking responsibility for everything that may happen on that adventure. Every participant who joins the Clipper race is aware of the risks it presents, they spend a minimum of four weeks (in this individuals case six weeks) training to deal with those risks so they know what they are getting into. It is the skippers responsibility to ensure they are not exposed to anything they are not trained to deal with however there remains a degree of personal responsibility that you follow that training.
 
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