Capt.Mooron wrote:
"Jeff" wrote in message

I've been sailing almost 50 years and never had a crew injured.

I view that statement in the same manner as "I've never run aground".....
accidents happen no matter what steps are taken to avoid them.

I can't begin to count the stubbed toes, cuts, rope burns, fingers jammed in
the sheets around the winch, hand slammed with the cockpit lid... and that's
just me!

As I said, nothing worse than a bandaid. Sure there have been stubbed
toes and rope burns and some bruises. On the second day of our
yearlong trip I actually almost fed my finger to the windlass, but
caught myself while still in the "bandaid" phase. Another split
second and I would have "Four Finger Jeff." And my daughter caught a
really nasty dock splinter. But no stitches, no broken bones, no
hospital trips, no insurance claims. I've never had a crew injured,
and I have to go back to my college days to when I did a few dumb
things to myself like use my arm as a fender, and my face as a boom
crutch.

Perhaps things would have been different if I raced more, or drank
more, but crew safety has always been top priority for me. It was a
major part of our decision to by a cat - no tipping, no steep
companionway, huge foredeck, modest rig compared to the size, shallow
draft, almost unsinkable - but that a whole other discussion.



Oh BTW... I've hit bottom an embarrassing amount of times. [ Till I learned
to turn off the sounder, since then.. nada]

I've scraped a soft bottom a number of times, and nudged a rock, but
never hit anything hard. My only bad grounding happened at anchor,
when we got pulled a lot closer to the riverbank than I expected. At
2AM I was frantically doing trig calculations to determine if the cat
could actually be flipped by hanging up on one hull!

People who live near shallow water with soft bottoms can take bottom
routinely, but on a rocky coast with 10 foot tides navigation is taken
seriously. And with the new electronics, there's really no excuse
other than stupidity and liquor.

BTW, the "bad luck" case I mentioned in my last post routinely bounced
off rocks, in some case the same rock several times. On his first
trip into Boston he followed the "Red Left Returning" rule and hit
Lower Middle at six knots, fast enough to break the engine mounts,
destroy the exhaust, and bend the rudder shaft.


I think both you and Bob are taking liberties with historical data... :-)

Actually Bob confessed to whacking a rock a mile from his slip, even
after his navigational error had been pointed out ...