BoatBanter.com - View Single Post

(Lauri Tarkkonen) wrote:

In Evan Gatehouse writes:

Roger Long wrote:
Someone once suggested to me pretending like the freeboard was 1000
feet and then thinking how your would approach deckwork.

I'll admit to being rather casual on this point but I'm really
thinking about this.

My wife and I discussed this when offshore cruising. Our
thought was that either of us fell overboard at night with
the other sleeping, you're dead. Simple as that. Always
wore our harnesses and clipped on to the jackline when
leaving the cockpit. Never slipped or had an incident but
you should take it seriously.

The same with us. No matter how calm or protected the waters, we
always wear life jackets when underway - not just offshore, but even
in the ICW. We wear the auto-inflate kind, and we tested them to see
how well they worked when we first got them.

We look upon lost hats overboard as improptu man overboard
drills and usually recover them in about 2-4 minutes. But
they are easy to miss and hard to see. A floating hat is
similar to a head in the water. Makes you appreciate the
usefulness of a Dan Buoy.

There is a minor difference in recovering a lost hat than recovering a
adult human being. Your recovery time of 2-4 minutes are for sure close
to unofficial world records, and I am afraid that even you might not
match the times if either of you were in the water and the other one in
the boat. Anyway this is not the issue, but there are several cases
where the crew aboard had had trouble of getting the ones swimming back
aboard. After a few minutes in the water, that is quite a cold in the
northern and southern seas, the ability to catch and hold on to the rope
is limited and to hoist a person even if you get hold of him/her is not
as easy as some armchairsailors might think.

There was a case some ten years ago here in Baltic, where the captain
fell into the sea, and even though his vife and daughter and son in law
got a rope to him and under his arms, they could not hoist him to the
boat soon enough, to prevent him from dying in hypothermia. It was mid
Jyly and the weather was reasonabl gentle.

We also have a way that we worked out so that either of us can winch
aboard (using the jib winch) the other one as long as the person is
conscious and can seat him/herself on the sling. We've practiced and
the gear is in the locker next to the jib winch.

However, if we have to go on deck in anything except a very calm sea,
we also clip onto the jacklines.

grandma Rosalie