Safety

The approach to safety must be seen as a dynamic process between it’s two distinct entities, ACTIVE and PASSIVE. Active safety belongs to the human factor and to the ability of the crew, as individuals and as a team, to react to an emergency and manage it with “creativity”; the second one is strictly connected with objective factors such as boat preparation, passage planning, complexity of safety equipment: everything can still be changed just until the moment we utilize it.
The seaworthiness of a yacht is an A to Z process and depends from a number of factors, including her structures, rigging and fitting, safety equipment checklists and our training of course. Any safety tool becomes efficient if associated with the crew ability to adapt it to any different situation and condition.

To learn how to brief the crew about safety is of the greatest importance in an ocean passage: the most common dangers (man overboard, fire, other situations requesting to abandon-ship) will have to be dealt with the control and rationality coming from our training and shared knowledge, panic being the first danger-booster that must be avoided.
Potentially, a safe crew is a crew in which everyone knows the 100% in any safety department of the yacht, from firefighting to radio communications and standard checks. Tasks must be clear and crews must have been trained on them. As a captain of his yacht, every skipper needs to invest an amount of time in knowledge, briefing and team-work before going on an ocean passage.