Should you require all crew on your boat to wear lifejackets? If so, under what conditions? Should you restrict access to some parts of the vessel when underway? Should those rules change in different weather conditions, or with different kinds of boat traffic nearby?

I suspect that many skippers make these decisions based on gut feeling and on who they side with in bar or forum arguments. Frankly, I don't think that's the best way to make critical safety decisions.

Risk assessment is a very well-developed art. Not every decision calls for a formal risk assessment, but putting a bit of logical thought into your key safety policies is certainly a prudent idea. Today, I present an informal walk-through of this process for the Starwind 860 trimaran we're currently building.

If you're wondering why the appearance of this site has changed 27 times since yesterday, well, we've been doing some troubleshooting.

I'm still not quite sure how it started, but the custom theme files that give this site its appearance somehow got corrupted last night. This resulted in the site displaying with no background images at times (so everything showed up on white), and no CSS at other times (so it looked like browsing in Mosaic, circa 1994).