Many discussions on these fora hinge around how safe, or unsafe,
some activity or process is. Very often two points of view emerge;
one based on a personal experience, and the other based on reports
of incidents. These discussions sometimes descend into personal
attacks - if you can't win the argument, question your opponent's
integrity, intelligence, skill, whatever.

You can't argue with the emotional impact that a personal
experience creates. For that person it's a fact, an event of high
probability. The population as a whole has to stand back and
accept this - then look dispassionately at the stats.

There is a useful tool in UK to help get a perspective on safety
matters - that's the record of accidents kept from 1979 until 2002
in UK at a group of major hospitals, then extended to national
probabilities. I'm sure there are more sources, just as good or
better. But the UK 2002 report is at:

http://www.hassandlass.org.uk/query/...s/2002data.pdf

Before you load it, bear in mind it's about 70 pages of pdf -
that's killerbites if you're tied to 56k modem. In that case you
may choose to play around in the RoSPA web site to access the
databases directly (Google it).
The data link thousands of equipments with hospitalising injuries
in 2002. Examples:

Sailboard (all) - 472
Water Scooter - 185 (well , it was 2002)
Oars and Rowlocks - 103
Mast, sail and rig - 267
All types of boats - 2,932
Quad bikes, ATVs - 4,346

And to put this in perspective, these are part of a total of about
5,500,000 hospitalising accidents a year. So, 1/10 of us can
expect a hospitalising accident each year.

Now, what this doesn't do is say how many people participated how
much in the various activities. Otherwise you'd determine that the
least safe thing to do is to wear a shoe (linked to hundreds of
thousands of injuries). Nor does it say what might have happened
if you didn't use that particular item. I mean, if I didn't sail,
would I be rushing off on my PWC for some thrills instead?

In UK I suppose 50,000,000 wear shoes 50% of their lives, whilst
3,000,000 people spend 5% of their time on boats. So, 1/1,000
boaters suffer an injury each year (and that injury occurs during
a two week/336 hour window for most). So, there's only a 1/100
chance that my hospitalising injury will be due to boating.

Now, Martin is very good at digging out relevant websites, so
he'll probably find a site which does all this tedious calculating
for us. But in a few days I'm off to Greece to continue my search
for off-beat bars and restaurants. Sadly I won't be able to reap
all the benefit of his research - just the next few days worth!

Back in August
--
JimB
http://www.jimbaerselman.f2s.com/
Describing some Greek and Spanish cruising areas