Social cliques and safety...

This guy just made my day, Lefsetz on the best protest song of the twenty first century, and Krugman makes a very good point...

I mentioned a while back that a friend of mine had to make a decision whether to help bring a boat down to the Caribbean when his "Spidey' sense kicked in and he chose not to...

So, reading the current account of the N.A.R.C. carnage over at Lectronic Latitude got me thinking about group think, safety, and cruising rallies.

Now, I've made no secret that I think cruising rallies are, shall we say, a less than optimum way to go cruising... I don't like the way rally folk tend to posse up and how, in every instance of rally groups I've seen, the "rally" insulates them from interacting with locals and other cruisers... But, hey, that's a social clique thing and if you're a social clique kinda person and you want that kind of experience... Why not?

I'm told by a lot of defenders and promoters of cruising rallies that the real reason folks do it is they like the added safety net such an event of this sort provides... I don't know about you, but in the current N.A.R.C. as it unfolds I see the safety net being provided by the USCG and ships diverting to help sailors in peril. Point of fact, once you leave the dock on any of the various rallies you are really ON YOUR OWN. The illusion that you are not, tends to dampen down or silence that needful "Spidey" sense that would be in full tilt boogie mode if you happened to be leaving port on your lonesome.

Then there is the element of keeping to a schedule and the group think thing... Since I had a close friend coming down in the same time window, I was keeping an eye on the weather for his passage down and I was not having warm and fuzzy feelings about the weather picture. The weather system that was to become tropical storm Sean frankly bothered me and I felt that waiting a bit would be the prudent thing to do. I certainly would not have left in the N.A.R.C.'s chosen window. Then again, I'm not on a schedule and don't have to be in St Martin by such and such a date or part of a group that feels they need to be there either. It's a lot easier for me to make decisions on safety, route, and when to depart or more importantly when not to depart, without the pressure of the rally and group think...

Listening to Kitty, Daisey, & Lewis

So it goes...