Staying ahead of bad outcomes

The Storm Trysail Club is a private club dedicated to blue water sailing. To fulfill its mission, the Club has a keen eye on seamanship, with some highlights offered here by Ed Cesare (Commodore, Storm Trysail Club) and Rich du Moulin (Chair, Storm Trysail Foundation):

Storm Trysail Club and the Storm Trysail Foundation are very much involved in the development and promulgation of new safety techniques, technologies, and training.

Every year, we organize a number of Adult and Junior Hands-On Safety at Sea Seminars, and other safety-related events, lectures and webinars. Additionally, Storm Trysail has an entire library of online videos that we have produced, all of which are available free of charge as a public service to the sailing community.

Topics include: Man Overboard Recovery, Understanding Weather, Understanding Offshore Weather, Flares and Pyrotechnic Devices, Storm Sails, Shipboard Firefighting, Safety Equipment, The Ocean Prediction Center, Liferaft Deployment, and Emergency Steering. We’ve also recently added a module for short-handed sailors.

The entire library is available here: https://stormtrysail.org/sas-resources/

In addition to the videos, there are several other safety-related resources available on our website. We’ve collected together a variety of documents – some from other noted organizations, and all are also available to public.

Finally, in November 2020, Storm Trysail organized a large symposium on Offshore Leadership as we came to realize that Leadership is one of the most important aspects in preventing accidents in the first place, and in managing and mitigating incidents and damage to people and vessels. Speakers included Sir Robin Knox Johnston, Gary Jobson, Ken Read, Dawn Riley, and Stan Honey, as well as variety of military, exploration, civic, business, and academic leaders.

We created a comprehensive report (available at no charge here: https://stormtrysail.org/reports/osls2020/) as well as detailed breakout session reports.

Over the years, we’ve held Adult Hands-On seminars in New York, New Jersey, Texas, California, and Illinois, and recently partnered with Royal Bermuda Yacht Club to hold one in Bermuda – our first international seminar. Our next Adult Hands-On seminar will be in Chicago, sometime late this summer or early fall.

While Safety at Sea has always been important, best-practices are constantly changing as boat design evolves, new equipment becomes available and, unfortunately, there is always something that can be learned when a tragedy occurs.