Not long ago, a man sailed around Cape Horn, singlehanded. An amazing feat, fraught with peril. But he got through, only to die at his first landfall, falling from aloft. Closer to home, another man died, just down the road from my shop, when his bosun's chair broke while he was working on some spreaders. These were just two examples of many that we hear of each year. And like almost all of the other examples, these two were utterly, easily preventable. I've written and spoken many times before on this subject, precisely because such accidents are such a waste of human life. Obviously, no matter how often or loudly I talk about safety procedures, there will never be a shortage of people who ignore them. But many victims of falls are sensible people who just don't realize the danger they are putting themselves into. This seems to be especially true of sailors; going aloft is part of our image and heritage. It is something we have always done. The thing is, we have also always fallen, and today's boats are a lot easier to fall out of than those of yore. Fortunately, we now have access to procedures and equipment that can actually make us safer than on the boats of yore. We just have to start using what's available. So here goes, once more.

   From where I sit, I can see an old-fashioned plank bosun's chair. You know the kind - a hole in each corner of the plank, with some stout Manila rope passed through it to form a four-legged sling. The halyard hooks in where the legs of the sling meet. This is the kind of chair that I first went aloft in, and I can tell you that, even when well and properly made, it is one dangerous item. The slings must be quite long, in order to form an angle that won't compress your thighs. So you can't get very close to the masthead in it, which is why many people come to grief when standing up in it in order to reach something at the masthead. But even if you don't pull a foolish stunt like that, this chair is still very easy to fall out of, front or back. It can be - though rarely is - upgraded in safety, with the addition of crotch- and back-straps, as shown on page 253 of the new "Apprentice", but even then it remains, if I may quote myself, "a marvel of simplicity, economy, utility, discomfort, and danger."

   The plank chair in my shop lacks such upgrades, but that isn't what killed the last person to sit in it. The chair also lacked a seizing, where the rope sling (properly) crosses itself under the seat. This seizing is there so that, if one leg of the rope breaks, enough of the sling remains intact to hold you up. No seizing on this chair, but that is also not what killed the occupant. What killed the occupant was that the Manila rope that formed the sling was about 30 years old, and so rotten that both legs on one side just carried away, dropping the man like a carnival dunk'em seat.

   This brings up an important point: good gear is nice, but good procedure is even better. It is poor procedure to hang from anything that is 30 years old. It is poor procedure to hang from anything, no matter how new, that one has not first thoroughly inspected. And it is poor procedure to be ignorant of or careless about the nature of the materials that one is hanging from; in this case that means that Manila has a propensity to rot, and is susceptible to damage from sunlight and from gases like carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. That is why, industrially, Manila is used with a safety factor of 10:1, while synthetics are used with only 5:1.

   The man that died did a lot of things right: he had an experienced deck crew to help him; he was deeply experienced himself; he even, I am told, bounced on the halyard before ascending, to check the strength of components ( I can only think that he didn't bounce very hard - it might have been a going-through-the-motions ritual - because a solid bounce would, I am sure, have broken this rope). The trouble was, he didn't do enough right; didn't have a safety halyard to a harness, didn't inspect, didn't think about the materials. He just went up in the same chair he had probably been up in dozens of times before, and which had never broken before, so why worry?

   The Cape Horn sailor died for different, but related reasons. He didn't have rotten Manila to deal with, or any kind of rope for that matter, because he had mast steps, those ultra-convenient "stairways to the spars" that look so reasonable in ads and at boat shows. But once again, even when they are of the best design, and are used with caution, they are inherently dangerous. They register on our unconscious and conscious minds as a ladder, and ladders are relatively hard to get hurt on. But steps are a peculiar kind of ladder, a primitive style with a single upright in the middle and the rungs on either side, so there is little or nothing to contain the climber laterally. I know little of the history of ladders, but wonder if the modern two-uprights-with-rungs-inbetween design got to be the standard because it was more secure laterally, both for the feet and the hands. These details are very significant here, because of the rocking motion of a sailboat - the climber is always being pushed, in varying degrees, from side to side.

   Rake is also an issue. On a normal ladder, the climber is held onto the ladder, to some extent, by the fact that the ladder is angled to the building. Anyone who has climbed a fire-escape or similar vertical industrial ladder knows how much of a difference a little rake can make. On a boat, things are often even worse than ashore, since almost every mast is raked a bit aft, and most people go up on the aft face. On the other hand, mast rake isn't sufficient to be much help if you go up the front face.

   It is of paramount importance, therefore, that anyone climbing mast steps should be wearing a climbing harness, with a safety halyard of some sort attached to it. Even a singlehander can rig up a way to do this, with Prussiks, Machard tresse, fall-arrest gizmos, etc. Our Cape Horn sailor died in front of the horrified eyes of his wife, who had flown in to meet him in Chile. Deck crew, and potential survival, unused.

   I am in the business of climbing masts. The level and seriousness of our loft's safety procedures is rare, even among sailboat riggers. The reason that more professionals don't die is that skill and experience can go a long way towards compensating for lack of safety. But even in our laudable state of obsessive redundancy, I have, on occasion, come a little too close to falling. The trick is to get to a place where you don't ever get that close. It will never be safe to go aloft, but keeping that fact in mind will, of itself, tend to make the job less dangerous.

   I once heard it said that "Everything that is worthwhile is dangerous." This is as true for personal relationships and freeway driving as it is for mast climbing. So I hope that all this talk of accidents won't dissuade people from going aloft. The idea is to do so, and survive to brag offhandedly about it.

   As for my interest here, it might seem that it is not entirely altruistic. In addition to getting paid to go aloft, I design and sell gear for doing so, and write about it, and made a video about it, and hold classes on it. But as wonderful and excellent as my contributions are, and as much as I hope that multitudes of people will continue to take advantage of them, such items are a long ways from being mandatory. Mostly, I would just like to hear fewer sad stories.

   Fair leads,

      Brion Toss