I thought I would share my experience from Saturday. Our club is running a four round offshore endurance series this year, the first was on Saturday. This is all petrol/nitro deepvee or cat, as FE simply cannot do 20,30 and 60 minute races.
Anyhow, after managing to run over the top bouy (which is about 50m past turn 3) and flip my boat. I went out in the rescue dinghy to recover it. Our dinghy is a 6' aluminium dinghy with a 2hp outboard. I got my boat and was on the way back when another boat came straight towards me, hit the side of the dinghy and hit me square in the chest. This knocked me over and the dinghy flipped and I was swimming. Fortunately I had on the life jacket and the water was warm. The dinghy however went stern down and was floating (just) with only the bow sticking out. I was ok and tried to swim the dinghy back to shore but that was a no go. The guy that hit me jumped in and swam out a rope and a couple of others pulled the boat back in and we swam back to shore with our boats.
The club member that hit me had throttled off as he came near but simply misjudged where his boat was. The rule is that the rescue boat has right of way, period! I was not hurt (except a small graze and bruise on the sternum) and did not panic when I went in the water. It is all good and after recovering every thing we carried on with our days racing and I dried out by lunchtime.
What did I learn?
Accidents can happen, even though we try our best to avoid them.
Our dinghy needs more bouyancy, I should have been able to right it, recover the oars and get back to shore.
We need a better lifejacket. Even though it did it's job, it was difficult to swim in.
If this had happened to someone else, or in winter, then perhaps it could have been much worse.
I spent a lot of my younger days in and around the water in dinghy's and small and not so small sailboats, I think that helped as I still knew what to do and didn't panic. It just shows that even with precautions things can go wrong. As one of my clubbies put it, "it was serious..but funny". I also have no ill feelings toward the other clubbie that hit me, he just made a mistake and I'm ok. But there are things that we will learn from it!
NZMPBA 2013, 2016 Open Electric Champion. NZMPBA 2016 P Offshore Champion.
2016 SUHA Q Sport Hydro Hi Points Champion.
BOPMPBC Open Mono, Open Electric Champion.
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