Water safety is everybody’s responsibility

At the recent Semaine Olympique Française in Hyères, an incident occurred where a boat was unmanned at high speed after its driver fell overboard when it accelerated quickly and unexpectedly. The abrupt movement was a result of the accelerator being hit by the boom of one of the boats that the driver setting up to tow. The driver had detached the kill-cord despite keeping the boat in forward gear while they set up a tow line.

The driver was following the procedures by wearing a personal flotation device (PFD), which mitigated the risk to themselves and was quickly picked up by one of the boats they were attempting to tow. However, the boat was moving at high speed, unmanned in the direction of another racecourse. While control of the vessel was eventually regained, it collided with another vessel, had a near miss with an anchored mark boat and triggered search and rescue operations.

This incident reinforced the need to ensure safety is everyone’s responsibility and not just limited to participants in races. The course at events can be a crowded arena, with race officials, coaches, and media, as well as those racing, all on the water at the same time. This increases the risk of collisions with other boats, as well as with other objects in the water.

World Sailing’s Director of Events, Alastair Fox, said, “At events, safety is everyone’s responsibility and it is important that sailors, coaches, team leaders and organising authorities recognise their role in ensuring events are safe as well as successful. The newly approved Safety Commission will be focusing on developing all sorts of safety information as well as looking into incidents to ensure lessons learnt are shared with the wider sailing community.”

RIB (Rigid Inflatable Boats) drivers must always follow procedures to ensure safe practice – which includes use of a kill-cord and wearing of a personal floatation device. Juries can (and in this case did) impose penalties to reprimand anyone breaching the regulations.

The RYA has prepared a helpful series of short instructional videos on how to use a kill cord. 

The situation is very common, and occurs all over the world almost every day. Most of the time coaches tow sailing boats without any issues.

But this time, contributing factors that alone are not an issue came together and resulted in a dangerous incident. These include:

• the RIB being rented and a model unfamiliar to the driver
• the handle of the controls being different to the configuration the driver is accustomed to, and
• the kill-cord supplied with the boat being much shorter than the kill-cord usually used by the coach which would allow more movement.

The potential for seemingly minor changes contributing to a major incident highlights the importance for coaches, team leaders and support teams to plan ahead.

In this case there were several mitigating factors including quick actions of the event organisers to manage the situation while communicating and co-ordinating with search and rescue organisations. They also prepared a report to share the lessons learnt with others in the community. Please use the World Sailing Incident Reporting Portal to report any incident, big or small. You can also find information on all reported incidents online.