I heard alarming news when I ran into one of my sailing buddies the other day!
Their partner had had a nasty de-gloving accident on their boat at the end of last season, when load suddenly came onto a rope wound around their hand. A painful accident that resulted in a lot of subsequent medical treatment, not a small amount of which was surgical.
Unfortunate and distressing - I don't know the details, but in any case would be hard to be judgemental, but two things jump out :
Firstly - wear gloves at any opportunity, but absolutely always when dealing with mooring or anchoring. We try to do this on Annabella, but it's always when the action starts to hot up that one is tempted to take short cut and give the gloves a miss. We have tried to overcome this by having a lot of rigger style work gloves in the cockpit pockets and lockers. At less than £2 each its not expensive. So far so good.
What if we had that accident at sea ? If there was any luck in the original incident it was that it happened on the pontoon, so medical attention was very prompt.However, you wouldn't have to be very far out to sea for attention to be two, three or four hours away. And off shore !
We will find out what the first aid would be + update the post as soon as we can !
