Risk Management Magazine

Mishap investigations rarely uncover new contributing failures. Nearly every mishap is the result of a combination of the same errors that contributed to a previous mishap.

My friend and I had been planning all week to take his 16-foot catamaran sailing on Santa Rosa Sound, Florida. After I made the three-hour trip to his house, he greeted me in his driveway and suggested we get going soon because bad weather was forecasted. That should have been my first clue that this trip wasn’t going to end well.

It was spring and I was stationed at beautiful Camp Pendleton, California. I had just recently married my high school sweetheart, was two months from pinning on the rank of corporal and was gearing up to go on my first deployment. I thought my life could not get better until I received a phone call from my older brother asking if I was interested in purchasing one of his motorcycles.