By LOIS HUNT | My switch off from work is to go racing in small dinghy boats at my local sailing club at Williamstown on Saturdays.
I am a great believer in balance in your life, and physical exercise and being outdoors is such a great contrast to the hours in the office and on the computer. And small boat sailing stretches the body and the mind — as my aching muscles tell me every Sunday morning.
Last weekend I had one of those unforgettable days of sailing, and not for good reasons. It was all because of what went wrong — and it was my fault because I lost focus.
Like many of us do at times, I was trying to do too many things at once — and stuffed up. At our club I am chairman of the Sailing Committee and have some responsibilities around organising the days racing.
On this particular day we had invited participants in our ‘learn-to-sail’ program to join in a race as crew with more experienced sailors to give them a taste of what racing is about.
So in my wisdom I offered to take on a crew myself, and at the same time was busily making sure all the participants were matched off with skippers, knew what to do, had the right gear. I even dashed home to get extra wetsuits for people — as the weather was going to be very blowy and wet. And inbetween I was supposed to be rigging my boat.
The trouble was I got sidetracked, and came back to it later and didn’t follow standard safety procedures. Yea, this turkey in her rush of making sure everyone else was organised forgot to organise myself. So three little essential things called hatch covers were not screwed into place — these are what make your boat watertight if you capsize.
So to cut to the chase — we were out in the Bay, halfway between Williamstown and Port Melbourne — the race started , the weather had pretty strong winds and a challenging situation with an inexperienced crew.
After only five minutes of racing I didn’t respond to a big gust quickly enough, and my crew couldn’t move fast enough and we capsized. Now capsizing isn’t generally too much of a problem — there is a standard procedure on how to right a boat and we got into the swing of it. But of course, unbeknown to me — those hatch covers were not there — and the boat filled with water while it was upside down.
We have safety boats that came to our rescue and attempted to help us right the capsized boat. Due to the amount of water the boat took on — it became a major exercise to stop it sinking and we were eventually tied up to the start boat.
Those helping me on the start boat thought we must have had a major hole in the boat. It took nearly another hour to work through various ways to de-rig the boat and right it — even then it was still full of water and I had to be towed back to shore while literally sitting under water in the boat.
It was only when I reached the clubhouse, a bit hypothermic, that I could see what had caused the near demise of my boat — my own incompetence in not doing a safety check and leaving off all three hatch covers. I was lucky the boat didn’t sink.
So what happened? I just lost focus. Trying to do too many things at once — and obviously not doing some of them very well. Could it have been prevented? Of course. We were lucky- — the boat could have easily sunk and I also put myself and my new inexperienced crew at risk. Not smart.
So what have you done lately because you lost focus!
We all do it — often because we are too busy to make time to do things properly.
Sometimes the results can be catastrophic, whether it is in business decisions or personal decisions. So my lesson from last Saturday is to get my priorities sorted out at the Club on Saturdays, learn to say no to some things and don’t over commit, and make sure I do the task or job properly and give things the right amount of attention.
