Did I get that right?I see where you aren’t getting it. It’s really tough for a cruise ship to sneak up on an escort boat and get to a point where ”A big cruise ship is bearing down on a swimmer”. The boat captain, the swimmer’s crew and the official observer, should all see the ship from a pretty good distance and alter course to get the swimmer out of harm’s way.
Any captain or race official who can’t get a swimmer out of the way in the 5-10 minutes it takes from spotting the possible danger to the time the ship arrives, is grossly incompetent or negligent and has no business being involved with the race. The race safety officer should cover all of this in the safety briefing.
If the officials do allow a swimmer to be in immediate danger, then they need to pull the swimmer and get out of the way. This is just common sense. But I guess it may not be that common. Once I was a race official on an escorted swim and we had a barge coming down the river towards us, the swimmer’s crew told us to radio the barge captain to tell him to pull over. I informed the crew member that wasn’t going to happen and we needed to get out of the channel and towards shore. We angled the swimmer out of the barges path and 5 minutes later after the barge passed we moved back to the faster water.
Did I get that right?I see where you aren’t getting it. It’s really tough for a cruise ship to sneak up on an escort boat and get to a point where ”A big cruise ship is bearing down on a swimmer”. The boat captain, the swimmer’s crew and the official observer, should all see the ship from a pretty good distance and alter course to get the swimmer out of harm’s way.
Any captain or race official who can’t get a swimmer out of the way in the 5-10 minutes it takes from spotting the possible danger to the time the ship arrives, is grossly incompetent or negligent and has no business being involved with the race. The race safety officer should cover all of this in the safety briefing.
If the officials do allow a swimmer to be in immediate danger, then they need to pull the swimmer and get out of the way. This is just common sense. But I guess it may not be that common. Once I was a race official on an escorted swim and we had a barge coming down the river towards us, the swimmer’s crew told us to radio the barge captain to tell him to pull over. I informed the crew member that wasn’t going to happen and we needed to get out of the channel and towards shore. We angled the swimmer out of the barges path and 5 minutes later after the barge passed we moved back to the faster water.
