Today in club news: the mast broke on one of the club's largest boats, Knotty Rascal. Yes, slow down and read that again: The mast snapped in half on the club's 27 ft cruising yacht--while it was under sail! Club leaders quickly yelled "vandalism!"
Think about that. Either it was vandalism (extremely unlikely), or it was gross negligence. Someone could have been seriously injured had they been hit by the falling rig. The boat had to be towed in afterwards. Even if you're not a sailor, you know that a boat's mast should never, ever come down, except maybe in a hurricane.
KR is a cruiser with wheel steering, a large cabin, and an engine. Don't imagine you'll ever be able to sail it, though--even if the mast gets fixed and you cough up the bucks to join Hoofers (oof). The ratings checklist for KR has almost 500 items on it!! The boat is strictly reserved for club leaders and their friends (like all the club's best boats).
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How do you know it wasn't vandalism. People are all over the lakefront on weekends especialy and something could have happened that would cause the mast to break.
ReplyDeleteThe checkout sheet for KR has nothing close to 500 items. Is somebody feeding you a line of bullshit, or are you just making it up as you go?
ReplyDelete?What are you looking at? Oh, I get it... you must be an instructor or BOC member and are therefore using the "short" list. Ha ha.
ReplyDeleteWell, the regular list for us general club members, which you've (previous poster) apparently never seen, has about 250 items, and each of those has TWO boxes: "performed" and "mastered".
Hence there are around 500 items to be checked off. It's too late in the evening to count them exaclty.
Each rating on the heavy keelboats requires getting a sheet of items checked off. While the number of items on a sheet varies across boats and ratings, it is pretty close to 40 in all cases (eg, Spray day skipper has 41). To get a night skipper rating (the highest rating given by Hoofers) on the cruising keelboats requires going through three rating sheets. The racing fleet requires only two such sheets to get a night rating.
ReplyDeleteSo, there are about 120 overlapping and non-unique (eg, MOB and landings are on all sheets) items which are necessary to have checked off before getting a night skipper rating of KR. Even allowing for a double counting (taught versus mastered), this does not even come close to 500.
Using the most generous counting method would bring the total number of items to about 250. A more reasonable count, which considers only the day skipper rating and does not count the same skill twice, will yield fewer than 70 items.
From the lessons I have taken both this year and in the past, the standards are applied uniformly to both instructors and non-instructors alike.