As someone who has spent a lot of time teaching people to use powerboats safely it is interesting to see the French approach to risk management and safety. The UK has a sad history of accidents resulting in deaths and serious injury from using powerboats, especially RIBs. That’s resulted in an approach to managing them and ‘good practice’ standards that are far removed from what I see here. To be clear I see no evidence of the French approach being dangerous, and indeed I suspect that they don’t have our history of accidents, suggesting a higher standard of safety. But what I see would have many of my UK colleagues tutting: no kill cords in use, sponson riding, indeed driving the boats from the sponson and driving whilst standing, even with tiller steered boats. And yet the standard of boat handling is consistently very high with a casual and unconsciously competent displays of excellent boat control.
More generally I can’t help but notice that the French approach tends towards less physical infrastructure and more towards people being encouraged to be sensible. Walking on the wave screen wall at Trinite there was no railing either side – just an obvious edge. Walking around an old castle there was no fence to the drop into the dry moat, just a band of about a meter of larger pebbles to delineate where the safe footpath finished. I must confess I do like the approach of expecting a bit more from people, although I’d still favour the use of kill cords – once you’re used to them they really aren’t much of a pain and are a simple mitigation to a low probability, very high impact event (ie falling out and being mown down by your own boat and propellor).
When, in a former life, I did my professional training in Occupational Health and Safety we were taught a clear hierarchy of desirability of risk mitigations: safe place was far preferable to safe person. the thinking was that in a workplace you should not need specialist knowledge or equipment to stay safe. In a controlled environment that still seems to me to be the preferred solution: you provide effective dust or fume extraction, not respirators to anyone who enters the space. But I wonder if that culture has bled out from making factories and laboratories safer workplaces into the wider public assuming that their safety will be managed for them and that they don’t need to worry about it. That might be one of the reasons why the construction industry has long struggled with its safety record – construction sites are usually difficult to control fast changing environments.
There’s been a lot of research showing that risk perception can have an outsize impact on risky behaviours: across London railings have been taken down around pedestrian crossings, and pedestrian injuries have been reduced. Car drivers are slower and more cautious around exposed pedestrians, yet the old railings afforded little real protection to the pedestrians. I wonder if the French approach to boat handling and education is more effective. But then every town we’ve visited has had huge sailing schools taking all the local children out, so familiarity with the environment is deeply ingrained knowledge.
Cameret proved to be a nice little seaside holiday town that was having a Fete for the local lifeboat, complete with helicopter winching exercises off the quay a little after we arrived. The visitors berths a quite a walk out along the breakwater (no railings…) and the sanitary facilities are a bit basic. We elected to shower on board for the two nights we were there.
Whilst in the Morbihan we’d used the boat’s black water holding tank to capture toilet waste and then pumped out in Port Du Crouesty. The boat was built with a holding tank for the aft head, and you can choose to flush to toilet into the tank or over the side. When built the only way to discharge the tank was to pump it out (by hand) back through the toilet’s normal discharge over the side. For our trip to Holland some ten years ago I’d also fitted a deck pump out fitting allowing the tank’s contents to be pumped ashore. That turned into a bit of a mission. I couldn’t find a pump out deck fitting that visually matched the existing deck fittings for water and fuel. Finally I contacted Nautor, the makers of Swans, in Finland and they explained that the fittings on our boat were custom made to their specification. They offered to have a pump out fitting made to match. It cost about 500Euros in the end, but I felt it was worth it to keep the boat (and Swans of this vintage are sort of iconic) looking right. Anyway in the end it all seemed a little excessive as we never found anywhere on the Dutch canals with a working pump out station, despite all the warnings before we got there that it was mandatory to pump out ashore. I’ve never regretted having the option but had never actually used it before. We connected it up and pushed the button and could see liquid being extracted through the window in the hose. It took a good ten minutes to suck the 120l tank dry. Carteret saw the tank put back into service, though I pumped it out by hand once suitably offshore.
We had two nice dinners ashore in Carteret, and a much needed trip to their excellent SuperU to stock up before we left this morning to head North and up through the Chenal Du Four. After filling up with fuel (215l, the first since Brest) we sailed for a bit to start with before the wind died away. It was grey all day, though not at all cold.
By later afternoon we were working out way into Aber Benoit where we picked up a visitor mooring, put the kettle on and tidied up. The harbour master popped by, took 18Euros for the night and offered to take any rubbish ashore if we needed, which was welcome, though not needed.
Tomorrow sees us head east to Roscoff.
