Building a Culture of Safety at Sea with Ministry of Sailing's John Schafer

[00:00:11] Hello everybody and welcome to Sailfaster. Today's episode is going to be a bit different, it's more serious perhaps but it's an incredibly important topic. It's a conversation I think that could truly save lives. And we're diving into a critical topic which is safety at sea. So this discussion feels especially timely in light of the recent tragic loss of two sailors during the Hobart race, which of course was a pretty sobering reminder of how vital preparation and awareness are out on the water.

[00:00:41] So joining us today is someone who's made it his mission to keep sailors safe and that's John Schafer. Many of you will know John from his Ministry of Sailing website and business, where he provides things like safety certifications, flare disposal service and countless other resources to ensure safer journeys for sailors everywhere. So we're going to be discussing with John how to prepare properly, whether it's coastal or offshore racing, how to create, maintain a safety culture and the really key topics that are going to be able to help you.

[00:01:11] So that's a topic of risk management in those situations. So hang on to the lifelines and let's get into it. John, hello from obviously snowy Wisconsin. Yeah, yeah. I'm in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, hoping to do some ice boating this week. It looks perfect. There's literally a piece of glass out there. It's going to be fantastic. These ice boats go 70 miles an hour, don't they? Yeah, yeah. We're hoping it's 70 to 80 this weekend.

[00:01:35] OK, that is a whole different safety conversation there. So John, tell us about Ministry of Sailing. What's that all about? So Ministry of Sailing started actually when COVID shut down the world. It was March 2020. We had just finished the Heineken Regatta and I was sitting there with a bunch of the guys that I race with and I was fortunate enough to be chosen to be on a Volvo 65.

[00:01:59] And so it's a pretty powerful race boat. And COVID shut down and I was there with a bunch of former military friends of mine that I've been sailing with for years and years. And we have always had in our mind to do a certification for a sailing rescue swimmer. Some of the gentlemen that I work with and some of the guys that I race with, these are techniques that we've used on some boats like the Volvo Ocean Race, stuff like the Clipper Race and some really high performance turbo boats.

[00:02:24] Because one of the problems that you have is when you have a man overboard, when you have three headsails up, it's going to take you sometimes miles to turn around. And by the time you get the boat under control to turn around, then it's going to be the search and rescue for your person in the water. And depending on water temperature, it could be a person is immobilized within 30 minutes just because of the temperature alone. When a person can't help themselves to get on a boat, you really have to start thinking about how to get the person back on the boat. There's too many stories of losing people in those situations.

[00:02:52] And so we just started putting an outline together of how we're going to write the certification because it's really important that as people start seeing these things happening on the Internet or if they see it in person, that they don't try it themselves. That they understand that you need the right personal protection equipment, you need the right training, and you have to have the right events that are going to be in place. And a lot of people will say, well, why would you put a second person in the water, right? You're doubling the risk. But risk can be mitigated, and that's my background, is mitigating risk.

[00:03:20] With a professional and with the right training, you start cutting down on doubling the risk because now you have a trained professional. And that's what we're looking at as a new profession in the industry, providing jobs, providing education, and providing the resources and how people can mitigate their risk. And so that's how it started. And then we had to name the company. Half of my company are Brits, New Zealanders, and we're deciding what to name the company. And we went through every name in the world, and as the night got longer, we started talking about this bar in the United Kingdom called the Ministry of Sound.

[00:03:50] And all of a sudden, all of us at the same time said, the Ministry of Sailing. So that's how the Ministry of Sailing started. We checked the Internet. It was open, and we had a website the next day. So that's when we started producing this certification project. And so now we have the Sailing Rescue Swimmer Certification. There's going to be some news coming out in the near future that you're going to see some pretty popular yacht clubs that are going to start hosting this before some of their big races. So you're going to start seeing these things pop up similar to a safety at sea. I'm also a moderator for U.S. Sailing Safety at Sea.

[00:04:16] So if you go to the safety at sea courses, the chances are probably one out of 18 you might get to see me as well. Yeah, I did the safety at sea course a couple of years ago now. And not surprisingly, it was very sobering. But the rescue swimmer is really interesting because there is that dilemma of do you put a second person into the water, and then are you then rescuing two people? I know that's not the intent of it, but that must have been something to think through quite good. Absolutely.

[00:04:45] You know, yeah, there was a lot of pro sailors that say never do that. But then you have the other half that have had experiences where they see how difficult it is. And I think when you think about that, a man overboard situation is really based on three phases. You know, the first phase is to control the vessel, right? The second phase is to attach the person to the boat, whether it's a line, whether it's a lifeline. But the most difficult thing and the thing which is least practiced is getting that person back on the deck of the boat. All right.

[00:05:13] Because it's going to take three persons minimum, all right, to pull a person back on the boat without the use of some sort of aids. But if you think about it, you have three people reaching over the boat trying to pull a person whose center of gravity is three feet below the water line. It's almost impossible. Very few people, when they practice man overboards, very few actually practice that last phase of getting the person out of the water.

[00:05:37] And I like to say that your man overboard drill is incomplete if you don't practice retrieving a person out of the water. Yeah. Thinking back to when I did the sort of US sailing course originally, you'd tie a couple of fenders and try them aboard. And the key emphasis was on probably keeping track of where that person was in the water and then learning how to turn the boat to get yourself in a position to bring them back up. But it was pretty easy to pull fenders on board.

[00:06:03] But to replicate that with, as you're right, you know, a 200-pound soaking wet, maybe quite frightened person is completely different. Presumably if you have four or five on the boat, one person or maybe two people have got to concentrate on keeping the boat in the right direction or at the right angle. Right. So you start to run out of people to pull somebody on board anyway. Yeah, exactly right. Because all of a sudden you're down a key person, right? And so you still have to control the boat.

[00:06:29] And a lot of people, when they practice just by throwing the, you know, throw your fender over, you know, that's a boat maneuverability problem. What people fail to understand is the sea state and the boat will dictate where that person is actually brought up inside the boat. I mean, a lot of people say, well, we'll just throw off the swim leg. Well, if you have a heaving boat going up and down in waves, you're going to crush the person. We have instances of three to four passes trying to pull a person in. A person can't help themselves. And you hit the person.

[00:06:57] And unfortunately, we've had situations where the hit was so hard on the individual, they lost the person altogether. That last phase of getting that person on the boat is really the most critical and the least practiced. So we really need to start emphasizing how to practice getting that person and understanding the tools that are on the boat to deal with that. And it takes lots and lots of practice. And I just, you know, if anything brings anything out of this conversation you and I are having, hopefully it's the practice getting that person out of the water.

[00:07:26] And I think it also brings up the question, you know, when it comes to what can happen on the boat and then are you prepared to manage that? And I think that's one of the key aspects of leadership for skippers to understand that they are the ones who are primarily responsible for every soul that's on that boat. And that means that they have the responsibility to do the safety, to do the training. One of the things is the constant safety briefing, which we talk about. The safety briefing shouldn't just occur right before you get on the boat or the once a month.

[00:07:55] You know, you know, on some boats with multiple halyards, you might have a rescue halyard that's always identified. All right. We're on this jibe. We have this halyard tree. So here's a rescue halyard or on this jibe. This halyard tree. This is our rescue halyard. So that constant safety briefing has to go on throughout, whether you're day racing, whether you're on a day sail, whether you're doing offshore racing, whether you're doing over, you know, three or four day distance races. I think that constant safety briefing has to go on in every shift change.

[00:08:22] You know, just do a refresher brief. That's how you build a culture of safety on a vessel. You and I talked a couple of days ago. I think we talked about skiing. And I remember when I first learned to ski, you know, probably 30 years ago now in California, hardly anybody wore helmets. When snowboarders came on, they wore helmets, started wearing helmets. And now, of course, everybody is. It makes absolute sense.

[00:08:43] And I just wondered if if you think there's any chance of sailing going, you know, sort of going that way where it becomes something that's just a normal part of the equipment. Well, I think what people are starting to realize, number one, thanks to the NFL, there's a lot more awareness of what happens over repeated concussions. I don't know too many sailors who have not been hit in the head by a boom. And if you haven't, you probably haven't been sailing very long. All right. The research is there showing that the head injuries are critical.

[00:09:08] Now, when we start thinking about the some of the loads that we're experiencing in heavier winds or the based upon the size of a vessel, you're starting to see more and more people doing it. Some of the universities around the United States now, it's a requirement for them to wear a helmet while they're racing universities. In some countries, you are also now the youth are also wearing helmets all the time in some countries. All right. So we're starting to see more development of that. Now, if we think about like what you said, culture is changing. Right.

[00:09:36] You look at the NHL 30 years ago, they didn't wear a helmet and the goalies didn't wear helmets. Now they've gone from helmets to face shields into neck guards. All right. So you can't find any child on the ice any longer without a helmet on. And so that takes almost a generation to change that culture. And so, yes, I think a generation from now, you're going to see more and more helmets. You're seeing them now in some of the bigger boats.

[00:10:00] If you look at some of the big J boats that they're racing, most of those crews on the bow are wearing helmets these days because there's a lot of hardware and the forces that are involved. It just takes one mishap. And then the head injury ends up an unconscious person and an unconscious person ends up in the water. And now you're in a situation that could have been controlled. It now becomes almost uncontrollable.

[00:10:24] And remember, the loads and speed of the vessels are increased so much now that you can get a head injury just by falling off a boat when you're going over 20 knots. And so there is probably a million reasons not to wear a helmet. But there's only one reason to wear it. It's going to save your life. The other thing that's probably fostered some interest in helmets is probably just SailGP and the America's Cup, right? Which I know, you know, falling by extreme speeds, but sometimes the sort of trailblazers like that can make it common for others.

[00:10:54] Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I'm not telling people just to go out and buy a helmet either. We've looked at and did a lot of research for this. And we think that snow ski helmets are probably most applicable because, you know, they're built to a standard. All right. What's nice about the snow ski helmets is they're designed for a liquid, although it's snow, you know, a water type of environment. And we think that the impacts are very similar to that, what the snow skiers are wearing and the loads would be, you know, probably equivalent as well.

[00:11:20] John, is there a time when having the right safety measured for you personally prevented perhaps something at sea becoming worse than it was? I want to say a few years ago, I think it was 2019, we did the Bermuda Ocean Race on my boat, which was a Catalina 445. And I think as much as the preparation that I put into it, I didn't realize one design flaw that made a difference for us. So the hatches on the windows, one of them had a single hatch and was glued on. So the handle was actually glued on.

[00:11:49] And through a Spinnaker change mishap, you know, a line got stuck on that and ripped off that handle because it was glued, which made it very, very difficult for us to close. And as a matter of fact, we couldn't fix it given the high water environment and we didn't have a screw to put through it either. So it was a lack of preparation on our part and a lack of realization on how fragile that was. When the seas actually got up to a state that were about 20 feet, we had to put the vessel in a position of which that we stopped taking water in. And so that ended our race.

[00:12:19] And for me as a skipper, I couldn't move deeper into a higher risk situation by moving away from the closest point of land, having, you know, an 18-inch hole open above the vessel pouring in water. And it was at that point I realized that as much as preparation that we did do, I didn't realize the risk of having that glued on. Now, the glues in most instances are going to be fine, but if they get hit with any lateral force, that's what happens.

[00:12:45] So from now on, whenever I have boats like that, you know, I just go buy another handle, plastic handle, and I screw it in the proper way so, you know, it has a stronger lateral force. So, yeah, that was like we all wanted the race. You know, we were doing really well. I think we were in our class. We were the third out of the bay. But it was just a situation that, you know, I just couldn't see bringing everybody further away from the shore when land was closer. That would have been almost impossible to predict, right?

[00:13:11] How do you prepare for – I mean, I know now you realize, but before it happens, right, it's very hard to prepare for something. Well, usually when I step on the boat, the first thing – I'm asking a lot of questions. And I think these are good questions for anybody to step on the boat to ask. You know, I think, number one, show me the DSC button. You know, how many people have a radio with DSC on them, but how many people don't know how to use and flip up the emergency distress button? Yeah. Right?

[00:13:34] How many people have MFDs, right, multifunctional displays, but how many people actually have that MFD labeled for the MOB button? Right? So there's a difference on many of them by just hitting the mark and hitting the man overboard button. But for me, one of the most important questions to ask for anybody getting on the boat is show me how the preventer works. That's a great one. And if people – and if skippers aren't walking through this when you're stepping on a vessel, I think it's going to be very important for you to think about, well, give me the safety briefing.

[00:14:02] I mean, you might be on a boat every single time and think, well, I've been on this boat before. But let's think about the airplane. Every time you get on an airplane, whether you like it or not, you're going to get a safety briefing. It's a reminder, all right? It's a reminder that things can happen. As unlikely as they might be, bad things do happen every single day. Safety on a vessel comes from leadership. I would go as far as saying you can't have safety without teamwork, and you can't have teamwork without leadership.

[00:14:30] So I think it's a circle that goes around and around. And so if you're concerned about safety, you're concerned about teamwork. So you're spending time on these things. And so when you're getting on the water, we know it's dangerous. We really need to start thinking about safety every single time we're on the boat and having those conversations. I think another critical aspect of leadership for skippers is to – when you get done with the race, when you get done with the sail – to ask a very simple question.

[00:14:56] And I do this every single time I race and every single time I'm on the water. I ask people before we get off the boat and we go in a circle, what did you learn today? And then you can learn from other people. That way you learn other lessons. And I've never been on a boat when I haven't learned something. The other thing I think a leader needs to do when we're talking about safety and security is foster an environment that the person with the least experience on the boat can ask a question and feel free to ask that question.

[00:15:23] We have to enable the people on our team to ask the questions when they don't understand or they don't see something. Not everybody's at the expert level. I think sailing on every single boat shouldn't be a landing pad, a place for everybody to land and stay on that boat. It needs to be a launching pad, a place that people can learn and go from there, take their sailing experience to other boats and move up to other levels or even by their own boat, be a team leader.

[00:15:48] So I imagine a safety briefing on an offshore race or maybe a coastal distance race is one thing that I'm going to guess is practiced very widely. Do you recommend a particular safety briefing for inshore? Well, I think your safety briefing is going to change based upon a couple of different things. I think your safety briefing should always include the temperature of the water. Temperature water is important because then you're going to know how long you have to recover a person. How long is it going to take for them to become immobilized?

[00:16:16] I think your safety briefing is going to talk about the weather. You know, what's expected? I mean, everybody, well, hopefully everybody's starting to understand using that CAPE index, which is going to give us the likelihood of severe thunderstorms happening in the area. All right. So that's going to change your briefing as well. So your briefing is going to change based upon the circumstances that occur every single day. But it doesn't necessarily have to be the skipper. I love to hand out my briefing card and say, here, give the safety briefing. All right.

[00:16:43] That's a great way to build and develop team leadership and empower people and then teach them how to present themselves in part of the rest of their crew. So there's a lot of things you can do because no two days, you know, are the exact same. The other thing is I think we need to talk about if we reflect upon the Sydney Hobart recently, you know, the zone of death, you know. A friend of mine said it's we used to call those that triangle of pain or that area where there's lots of loads. It's kind of like Glasgow, right? They used to call them Glasgow on the clipper ships.

[00:17:12] You know, nobody likes to sit there, but you just like to move through it. So those areas that you move through as quickly as possible, those are going to be key elements of safety that you're going to be bringing in. You know, as you get a higher wind day, you know, the traveler could break and you don't want to be standing in that area. You know, if you lose a line, those are the things that are going to be very important. And every boat has those triangles of death or what I call the triangles of a certain pain. So one of my best friends lives in Glasgow. So I do hope he doesn't listen to this conversation. I was using that.

[00:17:42] You see, I said somebody else told me that. That wasn't me. You talked about a briefing card there. Do you have a briefing card available on the Ministry of Sailing or people can look at it and copy it? Yeah, it's on the website. If you go to the Department of Learning on our website, there's briefing cards and there's briefings that are available. And I'll give everybody a hint right now. There's not a product that you cannot buy in the world that is not on the Internet that has a white background. And so what you can do is you can organize those products on your boat.

[00:18:11] So you have the exact product of what it looks like on your boat diagram. And you can point particularly to what that looks like on your boating diagram. Those safety cards are very important because you have to remember that people learn in three different ways. Right. You have that tactile learning. They have to do it to understand. They have the audible learning. All right. And then they have the visual learning. And so when you use a card for your safety briefings, you're always pointing to these things or you're pointing to the actual areas. And so you're hitting every way that people learned in their safety briefing. So you're hitting them in multiple directions.

[00:18:39] And I think it's really important, again, have each and every one of your crew rotate on who's giving that safety briefing this week. I do have a couple of people on my crew who are very safety conscious. My bow person, Cynthia, does a lot of long distance offshore sailing. She's very, very safety conscious. Yeah. So I would empower that person if you have that. And if you have those people that are safety conscious, make them the safety officer. You know, once we start empowering people to be that safety officer that, you know, hey, design the safety. Skippers have enough to do.

[00:19:08] A skipper's job is to manage the boat. When you're driving a boat, you're making seven to ten decisions every second. And you're feeling the boat. You're feeling the waves. You're feeling the vibrations. Your eyes are fixed on the location that you're going. As soon as you take your eyes off, what happens? And this happens to everybody. As soon as you take your eyes off of your mark, wherever you're racing to, your hands stop moving. And as soon as your hands start moving, you're either heading up or you're heading down. And the same thing with safety. You know, you can't do it all.

[00:19:38] So, John, if I'm preparing for an offshore race, that's presumably a whole different set of protocols versus an inshore race. Or not? What do you think? Well, a lot of people might say that. I think that the only thing that changes is the availability of how long it takes someone to come and rescue you. Offshore, you need to start becoming more self-sufficient. I mean, I've sailed on the bay for the last 20 years, right? Sometimes the ocean comes to us. It goes from the light winds to the heavy winds. And when it comes, it comes very quickly. We've all been in those situations.

[00:20:07] And so the preparation comes. What happens when that comes to you? All right. So your readiness has to be ready to be able to manage when those bad things happen. Let's just take a man overboard situation as an example. If we get somebody overboard, we do a lot of training. I'm talking about training again about what to do to retrieve a person who's in the water. But do we train our people when they fall in the water what they need to do? All right.

[00:20:29] I was coming in on a leisure cruise into Annapolis, right downtown, where a paddleboarder fell off, had the gas reflex, and they drowned. And so we're in the middle of a grid search looking for a person as we're coming in for our holiday weekend in Annapolis. All right. So do we train people how to actually fall in the water? When the water is of a certain temperature, you can get that gas reflex.

[00:20:55] So are we telling people that when you lose your balance, when you see yourself going into the water, to cover your face? Are you doing that thing to hold your breath? Expect that. When they do hit the water, what's the first thing you do? In a racing situation, you want to make sure you're visible so the boat behind doesn't hit you. The other thing is look around. If you turn around in a racing situation, the likelihood of the closest boat to pull you out of the water might be behind you, not your boat. All right. When you hit the water, what safety equipment do you have? Where are you tools?

[00:21:24] You need to get yourself to relax, take some deep breaths, and calm yourself down in the water. So, yeah. If our number one fear is people landing in the water, let's train them how to land in the water. Some really good tools out there. Presumably part of that is also having the right PFD. If you get hit by, you know, I'm at the back of the boat, get hit by the boom, go over and stunned, then having the right PFD will at least get you the right way up. Yeah. You know, for me, the right PFD is the one that people wear.

[00:21:52] But there are some that might actually help you if you are in a situation where the loads are such that you might get hit and be unconscious, then you wear a helmet. What's your advice for ensuring that everybody on board understands and adheres to safety protocols? Well, all right. So I like to call this the rules of racing or I'll say the four rules of teamwork. All right. The first rule of teamwork is keep water out of the boat. All right.

[00:22:19] Of course, these are the things that you do to supply everybody with the things that they need in order to prevent the boat from sinking. You make sure you do all of your safety stuff to make sure all the fittings are correct and look for those things that might cause things to not work properly. Right. So that's what you're doing. The second thing is going to be keep people in the boat. All right. Rule number two, keeping people in the boat means you're going to provide them with the resources they need to do their job. You're going to support them. All right.

[00:22:45] Remember, every single time somebody steps into or onto your boat, they're stepping away from somebody who loves them or something else. All right. Most likely, they're not professionals. They're not getting paid for this. They're stepping away. And so they're giving you their time. So you want to support them with the tools they need to do their job correctly, whether that's training. All right. Whether that's that's an experience. Some people are looking to have fun experience. Nobody likes to be on a boat where they don't have fun. So part of the skipper's job is to provide that type of environment. All right.

[00:23:14] You want to give them the tools they need to do their job. And in a way they want to do their job so they are. They can do that. Rule number three, don't hit anybody. That's conflict management. All right. There's going to be conflict on your boat. And conflict, which is unspoken, is conflict, which is unresolved. I like to say there's no risk whispering a lot of my boat. And this goes into safety. The reason is, is because when there's whispering, there's dissension.

[00:23:38] You hear stuff like, well, I wouldn't do it this way on the boat or he's not doing it the right way or she's doing this. You have to foster this environment. As a leader, you need to stop those things from happening and encourage these things to be spoken in a way that people understand what's going on. So this whispering leads to dissension. In an emergency, dissension leads to hesitation. Hesitation can lead to a greater crisis. So in an emergency, you want people to be trained so they know what to do.

[00:24:05] They understand what their responsibilities are, what their roles are, and hopefully you've practiced this in emergency. So the first time you're pulling somebody out of the water isn't in a man overboard situation. You've already practiced these situations, these skills, and you understand the tools to use on your boat. Those are what's critical. And the fourth rule is have fun doing it. Everybody likes to be part of a team. Everybody has an internal sense of belonging. You want to build a boat identity.

[00:24:31] So at the end of the day, at the end of the party, other teams say, you guys got a great boat. Win or lose, we want to be on your boat. You want to shake hands with your competitors and leave the battle on the water. That, I think, is successful. A key thing for me is about trying to make sure that everybody feels they can speak up. I was reading some study recently. It was sort of, you know, about team management.

[00:24:51] And the example they gave were airlines, where there have been a number of accidents over the years where the co-pilot or first officer didn't want to speak up. He knew that the captain was making a mistake or heading into problems, but felt that he didn't have the authority to speak up, and that was a disaster. So the airlines spend a lot of time making sure that everybody has the right to call and say, you know, I'm not sure about this without prejudice whatsoever.

[00:25:17] I've tried to practice that from a, you know, tactics point of view, but it's really interesting from a safety point of view as well. If somebody thinks you're doing something that's not quite safe or perhaps a piece of equipment on the boat could be different or changed or whatever it is in order to facilitate a higher environment for safety, that's something. Absolutely right. You know, it comes down to two things. That's called crew resource management. And you're right, the Air Forces and the Airlines spend a lot of time in crew resource management. And, you know, we need to learn from that as well.

[00:25:44] The only time I like to hear anybody raise their voice in a way that has urgency is the word stop. All right. I think that needs to be our clear word when we see a safety thing just to stop. That means everybody stops everything and we address what the emergency is. So we need to empower everybody when they see something to say stop when they see something that might be dangerous.

[00:26:07] The last thing you want to have is an incident on a boat where somebody, whether it's an equipment failure, whether it's a procedure problem. The last thing you want to have is somebody say in your after action review. Yeah, well, I didn't feel like I could say something. It's absolutely disastrous. All right. And that's a failure of leadership. And that's why I really drive hard on this. This idea that safety and teamwork and leadership, they don't happen in a vacuum. They have to happen all together.

[00:26:33] So as a leader, you're building the safety, you're building your teamwork and you're building your team. That's how that's how you win. And winning isn't necessarily getting across the finish line first. It's meeting the expectations of the people on your boat. That's winning. And that's how you know that your team is there. So defining what winning is, you know, winning is, you know, at the end of the day, you know, you performed to meet your expectations. Yeah, I like the pre-race briefing where before we leave the dock, just like many others do, is think about, you know, hey, what's our goal for today?

[00:27:03] While we're talking about teams, can we talk about communication? Because that team communication has got to play a really critical role when it comes to emergencies. And is that something that you think teams should practice or at least have an agreed plan of how you communicate what's going on? Absolutely correct. You know, I think if I bring my football background into some of this as well, I think it would be helpful. Again, you know, the first time you want to practice emergency is not in the emergency, right? Right.

[00:27:30] It's the first time you want to run a two point extra point for a football team. It isn't the first time you run that play. It's practice, practice, practice. Right. So you need to be able to develop some systems on your vessel to practice what an emergency is. Right. So how are you going to do that? Well, it's simulation. Again, I said before, you know, you want to use those days where you're not sailing, those those light layer days. So if you're going to practice these emergencies, it's going to be really important for you to identify what is the most likely emergencies to have. So you're doing a 105, right?

[00:27:56] So with the 105s, what are your, I mean, most typical emergencies or what are the most dangerous situations you're going to be in? Once you identify what those are, what is your plan to train to, number one, avoid those? How do we identify that situation and what words are we going to use for that? Like if I'm calling an audible, all right, as a quarterback, I'm not going to say the whole play. I have one key word for that play. If I can bring it on to one, you know, three syllable word, everybody knows what that maneuver is or what that play is going to be.

[00:28:24] All of a sudden, you're increasing, all right, your ability to understand that using less words to communicate. You need to find a way for your team to identify when the situation occurs and how they can communicate that. Whether that's a person who's looking underneath the sail, all right, who's seeing the blind side? How do you communicate what that risk is? It's, there's way too many times where I've heard people say, well, I saw that boat coming and I was saying something. But remember, communication is sending a message, a message is heard, and then you have to respond.

[00:28:54] I've seen that message. These are things that need to be practiced and need to be, I'm not going to say enforced, but we need to enhance those teams when they're doing that. So you identify the risk, you communicate the risk, and then you have that mitigation plan. Is this really a risk or not? So you need to practice things every single day you're out there because every single time we're out there, we're in different risk situations. What's the most common mistake that sailors make during emergencies? I think the most common mistake is lack of practice, and they haven't practiced what that situation is going to be.

[00:29:23] I think the other problem is they don't use names. And practicing leadership in emergency situations means you need to start telling people what to do. When it comes to that, by using names instead of somebody, because by doing that, you're causing someone to grab attention. So they might be panicking in their brain, but as soon as you call their name, they're going to look at you, and then they're going to take a breath, and then you're going to give them exactly what to do. That's really important, especially when you've got a person in the water, and they may or may not be able to grab a line.

[00:29:52] When you call their name, grab the line. Suddenly, they take them out of that panic mode, and it gets them into a rational mode. Remember, your brain is right and left. One side is reactionary, and the other brain, or the other side, is going to be rational. So you're going to have to tell sometimes people when they're in the reactionary mode to get out of that reactionary mode and go into rational by commanding them to do something and calling their name.

[00:30:15] So for beginner sailors, especially those sort of beginner sailors who perhaps step on a race boat for the first time, what's the one safety lesson you wish they knew? I'm sure there's 100, but is there one fundamental safety issue or protocol or idea that you'd want to make sure they knew? I think if I were to say the one thing that everybody should probably know is how to communicate in an emergency. Everybody should be able to know how to pick up the microphone and communicate in an emergency.

[00:30:43] And, I mean, you can get a free sticker from the Coast Guard Auxiliary that has steps one through nine written down there, because the faster you communicate in an emergency, the faster help is going to be there. Right by the radio. Right by the radio. Down below or maybe in the back of a handheld. Yeah. And then besides that, always keep another radio on channel 16, the hailing frequency. Always keep. I think you have to do that, don't you? I think legally you have to have, if you have a radio on, you have to have it monitoring 16.

[00:31:13] And it's almost an every single offshore rule. But yeah. Yeah. I think if you have a radio, it has to be monitoring 16. So, John, I knew this was going to be a fascinating conversation. I didn't realize how much I would take away from this. I need to listen to this back and write down literally 20 things that I need to think about and put in place for this year. The Ministry of Sailing website has quite a lot of this on there. Where would you direct people to learn more? A couple of different places.

[00:31:43] You know, the Internet's always great. You know, the Ministry of Sailing has its own YouTube. And we've been analyzing mishaps around the world for the last year now. I'm happy to say we've received 9,000 subscribers down on over half a million views. I'm going through almost every single module of Safety EC and in 8 to 12 minutes trying to pick one or two things out that I think are very critical based upon accident investigations and reports on how to do things different.

[00:32:10] I've got one coming up where it's unfortunate, but there's a guy's got 250,000 views on the wrong way to put up a preventer. And it's been proven to be wrong, but he's got 250,000 views, which means if people are thinking this is the right way and he's a trainer. I mean, he's missing a whole accident investigation based upon why you don't do this.

[00:32:32] And so if I can pull those things out and help sailors understand that there's a lot of information and everybody's learning on YouTube, but just because a person puts it on YouTube, it's important to understand the safety that goes about that and what the principles are. Because there's a lot of stuff out there that's not real. So one of the things you're going to see if you watch the Ministry of Sailing YouTube is we're pointing to the offshore special regulations. So it's not my opinion. These are based on accident investigations over the years and years of experience that we're sharing.

[00:33:01] We're sharing the right way that the OSRs are putting these together. And it's the same training that you would get as a Safety EC, but we're doing an 8 to 12 minute module. Everyone's going to be different. Sometimes you'll see me pick on YouTubers. Sometimes I'll pull out the positives. Like we did one on the positive recovery of the man overboard during the Chicago MAC race. I mean, the guy had all the stuff ready. It was all based on training. In 20 minutes, they had the guy picked up at night, right? We had the other one, the Sydney Hobart.

[00:33:31] There's going to be another one we're doing on that one. The Sydney Hobart man overboard. They had all the right equipment. The team was trained. They picked the guy up in an hour. You know, absolutely fantastic. Imagine that. So now we're seeing mishaps, which would have happened and have led to tragedy in the past, being mitigated by technology and doing that and through training. So it's not technology alone. It's still the training that goes behind it. So that's what we're doing is we're really looking at putting the safety. You know, we have a new product that we can come on up for a new boat owner.

[00:34:00] We will come onto the boat. And before they purchase the boat, we'll take the offshore special regulations. We'll break down based on their intended use what safety equipment they might want to consider purchasing. So they can include that into the loan to the boat. So they don't have to buy the $15,000 to $20,000 of extra equipment later based on their intended use. They can just build it in. That's some of the things that we're doing and walking them through that. And then always, we always point to the safety at sea because, as you said, you learn so much from those safety at sea.

[00:34:29] So those are the things we're doing with the Ministry of Sailing. And, you know, we do deliveries here and there and stuff like that. I got a question for you. I mean, you're asking me questions. I got one for you guys. How come whenever there's a T-bone, it's a G105? Well, I think that's probably the main tool has really strong loads on it. Oh, yeah. I think all of us have experienced that thing where the main trimmer can't unlock it and you lose the ability to steer the boat, basically.

[00:34:55] If you're trying to duck and you can't release that mainsail, you lose directional stability. I wonder if that's part of it. So now that you said that, let's go back into risk mitigation. Now that you know that's a risk, how do you mitigate that? How would you mitigate that if you know that's being a risk? So what I did when I heard about this and experienced it was to switch to a trigger release so that no matter what the load is on the sail,

[00:35:19] it's quite easy to actually pull down, which opens the jaws so that the mainsheet can fly. Great. So I've got one or two different mainsail trimmers. I always talk to them about, remember, if it loads up, pull down on it. And that's one thing I've done for that. That's awesome. So you just told me three things. All right. The first thing you told me is, number one, part of mitigation is develop awareness. Number one, be aware of the risk.

[00:35:45] The second thing you've done is you look at the mechanism for an equipment failure and you've replaced that to lessen the likelihood of that happening. That's great. The third thing you told me is you train someone. This is what you need to do when you feel there's loads going on. So those are three things that everybody should do. And we realize that's how you mitigate risk. Develop awareness. Look at equipment failures. Right. Replace that. And then training. Train the people how to do it. Use it. And that just brings up a last thing. You know, every piece of safety equipment is useless without the training that goes behind it.

[00:36:14] I'm working on YouTube right now where they had all the equipment. They had the man overboard module. All right. They had a life sling. They had cushions they could have thrown overboard. They lost the guy because they had the equipment, but nobody was trained on how to use the equipment. So, John, thank you for your time. You're very welcome. This has been extremely useful and relevant, obviously. So, Ministry of Sailing, both the website and your YouTube channel is where everybody should go. They should have it as a favorite tab and that sort of thing.

[00:36:42] Bookmark it as a favorite tab because there's a ton of information there. And I really appreciate what you do for the sailing community for this. I think it's fantastic, both in terms of the safety aspect. And also, you're really good at sharing relevant, interesting information for sailors. I think it's probably from your Instagram, I think, is pretty powerful. Thank you for doing that. Well, you're welcome. You know, it's a pleasure to be part of a community. And, you know, that's what I try to do. I try to enhance our community. You know, everyone's against us sailors. We've got to stick together.

[00:37:12] And that's the other thing. We're a subculture that unfortunately isn't getting bigger. So, we need to do everything we can to promote the safety, all right, and also our togetherness. You know, we can criticize all we want, but, you know, we're all sailors. At the end of the day, we have to be together. And it's okay to disagree with somebody. All right. But it's not okay to dislike somebody. The importance is to understand the difference between disliking and disagreeing. That's so relevant in today's world. That's exactly right, man. Well, thanks, John.

[00:37:43] Again, appreciate your time. And I look forward to seeing you on the shore. I owe you a beer. No, I owe you a beer. All right. Cheers, man. Thank you. Thank you. Cheers, man. Thanks, John.