Executive Summary

William Strassberg, MD

Sailors can learn from the crash of flight 8303. We can, on occasion, get into a situation that gets more and more difficult from which to recover. This can be caused by ego, or by a sudden change in the expected circumstances, or a lack of “forehandedness”, which was one of the late Capt. John Bonds’s favorite words to throw out at Safety At Sea students. Forehandedness, he’d lecture, was the ability to anticipate possible changes in the current situation and to be ready for them, much as our parents would admonish us to “drive defensively” when we were learning to drive.

This article suggests how the principles of handling emergencies on large ship can be applied to smaller private yachts – yachts capable of being cruised comfortably by two people. The principles can be easily extended to crews of more than two people, larger yachts, and professionally crewed vessels.

"What If?" is an excellent game to play onboard or ashore, with both experienced and inexperienced crew, day or night, at anchor or underway.

Good seamanship should include the ability to assess, address, and anticipate. The best offshore sailors use sight, smell, hearing, and feel to monitor what is going on below, on deck and in the wider environment for whatever may come next. Experience lets the crew member distinguish the significant concerns from normal variations. In a perfect world, every issue would be caught before it becomes a problem or emergency. Let’s snap back to reality—it’s not going to happen that way. Good sailors train themselves by running through “what-ifs” as an exercise on watch: