The lack of adherence to safety protocols when working aloft reveals a larger problem in the industry
It had been a long day for the crew of Taking Shortcuts with the young, seemingly tireless boss on board. The deck team was beat after a day of nonstop watersports, while the interior crew was gearing up for an impromptu cocktail party that evening. Just after the deckhand and bosun put the last toy away, a brief rain shower soaked the yacht and the chief stew decided to move the party inside to the sky lounge. With more showers expected, the captain told the deck team not to worry about drying the upper aft deck but to do the windows.
“Come on,” the bosun said to the worn-out junior deckhand, “let’s get it done quickly, and then we can knock off. I’ll squeegee, you chamois.”
Not bothering with their safety harnesses, they climbed outboard. They balanced on the narrow ledge under the glass panes, holding onto the handrail with one hand and wiping with the other. All was fine until the deckhand used both hands to wring the cloth. In his tired state on the damp, slippery rail, he lost his footing and fell backwards into the sea, bumping the main deck bulwark on the way.
This is a fictional scenario, but the sight of crew working aloft without safety equipment is disturbingly familiar, according to CHIRP Maritime, a confidential incident reporting program.
“The regularity of the photos submitted to CHIRP — often several each month — suggests that such behavior is normalized across the industry. At best, it demonstrates that many vessels do not adequately supervise their crews, and at worst, it suggests that, on some vessels at least, such behavior is actively condoned to save time. In reality, donning a safety harness is much swifter than dealing with a severe medical emergency following a fall from a height,” said a CHIRP report from December 2024.
The consequences of falls are sobering. In the last decade, polishing the stainless-steel rub rail on a 268-foot motor yacht ultimately cost a junior deckhand his life, while cleaning the mast of a 196-foot sailing yacht killed another young deckhand. The Republic of the Marshall Islands flag, one of the world’s biggest registries, noted that accidental falls were the top cause of deaths in 2019 and a leading cause of serious injuries on board RMI-registered vessels from 2016 to 2020.
CHIRP remarks that after its team receives a report of crew working unsafely at height and contacts the vessel, they are invariably told the crew member was not complying with the yacht’s SMS. So the question becomes, why not?
Captain Herb Magney, a maritime operations consultant who volunteers at CHIRP, says it has to do with yachting’s safety culture today being led by captains who earned their stripes moving up the ranks and don’t have a commercial background. They’re not imparting the value of being safe to junior crew because they themselves never learned it.
“There were a great many captains (back) in the day who were also pilots or commercial captains. So we had other training and skill sets that involved a lot of safety. Right now, it’s maybe one or two in 10 that have any industrial experience whatsoever in safety in the workplace. And we’re not providing it — not on an industry level. We’re building it into our ‘fix-it-all.’ It’s in our ISM; it’s in the crew training manual. [But] you’re not going to come on and read that your first week on the boat,” Herb says.
“However, if it’s done right, the DPA talks to the captain; they work together and say, ‘When you guys are going to do something that the person performing the task is not familiar with, that’s when you stop, you open your crew training manual to that page in that section and you review it together. Then you go about and do the task.’ But [the problem is] everybody is in too big of a hurry.”
Prompted by a CHIRP report, the Maritime Authority of the Cayman Islands put out a safety flyer in March this year with best practice suggestions, which included “creating a safety culture in which anyone on board can challenge unsafe practices; empowering crews with ‘Stop work’ authority if a situation becomes unsafe; reinforcing the importance of toolbox talks, Permits to Work, and Risk Assessments; and making it clear that safety ‘short cuts’ are no longer acceptable practice.”
Superyacht design, with its curvy, slippery slopes and full-beam decks, doesn’t help, though Herb says it’s improved over the years with Harken access rails and pad eyes more often being incorporated. Yet there are still inaccessible parts of new-builds, places beyond the track that deckhands can’t reach. That’s when they think, “It’s OK. I’ll just unclip for now,” Herb says. “Because it goes back to a lack of real concern and involvement, a lack of appreciation and value for what it means to be safe and to work safely.
“I’m surprised we don’t have more accidents.”