Risk Management in Sailing - Part 1

Risk Management in Sailing - Part 2

There are some very special times when I’m REALLY proud to call myself Ryan’s girlfriend.

Like for example, when he placed 1st at the Mister legs competition of the Iowa State Fare back in 2017, and took home the blue ribbon in the “whitest legs” category. That’s right, whitest.

But that’s a story for another time.

Ryan is a great captain, and part of what makes him such an awesome captain is his background as a pilot. Ryan went to college for aviation, was a pilot instructor for a while and briefly joined the army to fly F16s in the Iowa Air Guard before a medical condition forced him to stop flying in the military.

Since then, Ryan has worked as an aviation and airspace consultant, leading him to start his own consultancy business a couple of years ago. This business is partly what enables us to live our nomadic life onboard Polar Seal, and is the reason why Ryan travels so often. But back to the point, I’m losing myself here.

When we started sailing, a lot of Ryan’s aviation background followed us on the boat. A big piece of it in the form of his practice of risk management.

Aviation nerd Ryan meets sailing nerd Andy Schell.

Fast forward to 2017, when Ryan and I met Andy Schell and Mia from 59 North Sailing, who take paying crew on offshore adventures (remember when I followed them to Scotland?). We knew Andy from the popular sailing podcast he hosts,t called "On the Wind" (about the best podcast out there...), and created another podcast called "How I think about sailing"We became good friends and even ended up meeting them in Porto and Lagos this year.That's when Ryan and Andy came up with the idea to start a discussion on risk management in aviation applied to sailing, which has now become a series of podcast on risk management applied to sailing.

It’s awesome, and you can listen to it here, on Spotify, iTunes and wherever you get your podcasts.

And if you haven’t done it already, subscribe to Andy’s podcasts “On the wind” and “How I think about sailing”, our absolute favorite sailing podcasts ever since we started sailing!