In the wake of the recent monkey incident video from Sailing La Vagabonde, I had a think about how sailors could be better prepared from such land hazards when visiting remote locations. As a professional documentary film producer, part of my job is to prepare an extensive Public Risk Assessment (PRA) for each location our crew visits to shoot, which is then signed off by the production’s insurance company. The PRA is required regardless of the size of the shoot and crew; most of the shoots I produce are small scale, with three to four crew members and a local fixer. The PRA requires the assessor (whoever is writing it) to outline all the possible risks to your crew’s safety, along with how you anticipate controlling the risk and how this reduces the overall hazard.
I thus decided to put together a PRA template, adapted from a professional documentary film shoot to be more suitable for sailors visiting remote locations. You can download this template free and mould it as you wish.
As our family moves to full time sailing in the very near future, by habit I will take on the role of destination research and part of this will include writing up our PRA to outline health and other potential hazards. It’s simply good practice as you can know ahead of time what land dangers may be present at a location (especially when visiting remote destinations), from infectious diseases and what vaccinations are recommended (or required), to wildlife dangers (such as territorial monkeys!).
We hope this document can be of assistance for your sailing adventures.
Note: once we set sail on our Floating Stories Lab adventures, I anticipate creating an open-source doc/sheet storing our PRAs from each remote location we visit. I will then invite sailors to update these to the public domain so we can keep each other safe and informed.
Fair winds and safe sailing.
Angie and the Voyage Virage family.
