O/T: Abby Sunderland Rescued!

Jon Benet.

Yes, including supervised soccer practice every afternoon. Kids should have time to be kids.

You have read too many fictitious adventure novels, dude. The safest thing for her to do with what was in the water would be to cut it free so it would either sink or drift away - and not poke holes in her boat. Hulk Hogan would not be able to raise that mast and jury rig it

- WHILE ON DRY LAND. The chances of her even getting that mast back on board the boat were zero. It would have been a very dangerous and stupid thing to even attempt.

There is a problem with that approach. If you go missing without an EPIRB, they will still go looking for you anyway. It just makes the search & Rescue operation infinitely harder, and infinitely more expensive.

We chewed on this a bit over the weekend's barbecue and cigars.

Without all the speculation about remasting (thanks Hollywood!) the boat, I am wondering how she would now deal with the speculative "debris" or "material to be repurposed" mentioned. Would she cut it away, or would she use the "aluminum or carbon fiber or unobtainium or whatever else the pieces she has dragging in the water alongside the boat" to rehab/rework the boat into something she could sail, steer and navigate. Did she have the necessary tools to do so?

I have a friend that used to sail/race yachts competitively. While he had no money, he worked on the boats at a sailboat shop and they took him along as a hand. Once proficient, he made nice weekend money in the friendly regattas between held on the larger lakes around here.

I asked him what he thought about all of this... not much.

But then I posed JC's opine about righting a boat, chopping through debris, rigging a mast from broken material and then sailing away to a safe port.

I though he was going to spill his beer he was laughing so hard.

He reviewed the facts for me. OK... so this 16 year old 125 pound kid is going to *right* a dismasted 40' boat all by herself in the middle of the ocean?

She will swim around in the rigging, sails, fittings and broken mast to clear the wreckage. The she will have to right a boat that is as long as three of your pickups >>by herself

Amen.

There is no one reading this who could find that mast lying in a field in Kansas and raise it upright in a 5-10 knot breeze. I'm not sure they could do it in still air.

Abby was on a pitching and rolling boat in 30 foot seas and 20-60 knot winds.

Jon Benet.

Yes, including supervised soccer practice every afternoon. Kids should have time to be kids.

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Yep, 25 to a side football. Everybody on the field all the time!

I don't believe the boat was capsized, but everything else still applies.

snipped-for-privacy@aol.com wrote: ...

Indeed, it was the only option remaining which is the point was making to the whomever to seemed to indicate she might not have asked for rescue.

She is, to repeat yet again, _extremely_ fortunate circumstances turned out as did.

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Isn't that part of most dangerous exploits these days? With world wide communications available, most believe in the fact that rescue is a message away. Many/most believe that currently medical knowledge has an excellent chance of saving them if they can get help before they're brain dead.

Go back as little as 100 years and something like getting stranded in the middle of the Indian ocean was tantamount as a virtual death sentence ~ for most anyway. Most certainly for a 16 year old girl.

It comes back to my statement that these days most in modern day society believe if you throw enough money and technology at anything, a problem will be solved. That maybe true in a literal sense, but it's not yet true in our current day society.

And among some SAR groups there is a difference of opinion regarding emergency beacons. One school thinks they may contribute to more inexperienced and less well equipped people attempting feats they might otherwise think twice about.

Cites, please!

Personal communications.

Voices in your head?

What SAR groups?

Tut, tut.

Northwest US. Mountain rescue.

King Tut?

Cites please!

What part of Personal Communication didn't you understand?

Otherwise, see this for a similar example:

Psychologists likely have a term for it. It's pretty well known that safety equipment often provides the wearer with an unwarranted sense of invincibility.

Marines, returning from war zones, have a statistically higher rate of automobile accidents:

We can track over the last 15, 18 years, and that's as far back as I've gone, but every time you've had a contingency in the world where Marines go out there on the battlefield, when they come back, there's been an increase in traffic fatalities, Dickerson said.

"When they come back, they have walked through the valley of the shadow of death. What we're trying to do is eliminate these young risk-takers from doing something catastrophic and not coming back."

I guess the US Navy's skills aren't up to that task either then.

But what leads you to believe that the carried $200K worth of navigation equipment.