Wednesday 20 January 2010

More weather

It's exercise night tonight, typically the weather has come in again and it is due to pour with rain. Hopefully the wind will hold off sufficiently for us to get out to secure in the knowledge that we can revover the boat onto the slip at the end end of the exercise safely.

3 comments:

Mart said...

it must be difficult making the decision as to what represents 'realistic' training conditions and 'too dangerous' training conditions - after all I assume when you launch on exercise the shore helpers are also training in their roles.

Matthew Gibbons said...

It is a difficult decision as the LOM will most likely not be very popular with the crew if he makes the 'wrong' decision.

Exercising in rough weather can be benificial though as it is the only way to ready yourself for shouts, which are nodoubt going to occur on fairly rough days!

For instance, Training today was in fairly large surf, but it was useful to know how the boat handels in it, especially seeing as at North Berwick, we quite often get big waves! It also acts as a confidence booster as the crew now know in what conditions they are comfortable in.

lifeboatjohn said...

It can be a hard decision, but it should be a straight-forward judgement call. Bottom line is...training is important but never to the extent that you are unnecessarily risking either the boat or the crew. Recovering back onto a hard steel and concrete slip can be particularly tough on the boat. We've done it enough times to know what's worth risking and what's not. A shout is very different because we always have the option of not recovering but instead putting the boat onto our mooring until the weather abates or instead heading round to Poole.