I eventually got back to the ramp in
heavy rain, retrieved the boat and
headed home. I was soaking wet and
surprisingly cold. The driveway next to
my house is narrow and requires very
careful reversing. By this stage I was
mentally damaged and very frustrated
and in reversing the trailer I managed
to wrap the front of the car into the
concrete fence post adding another
thousand plus dollars to the day from
hell. But it didn’t end there! Once I’d
cleaned the boat up, stored the gear and washed
the rods I went to the letterbox and found myself
the proud recipient of not just one but two traffic
fines! I went inside and had a stiff drink, vowing
not to leave the house for fear of further damage.
That was one single disaster day, but it
seems to have set a bit of a pattern for many
events that followed, like white ants eating the
house. I won’t dwell on my personal issues, but
there is a very real phenomenon of one error
turning into three or even six. My simple
omission of leaving a bung out happened
because I dropped my echo sounder showed
that any event where you break a well-
established routine leads to errors. In formal
incident reviews, such as those I am involved in
assessing at work, these are called
‘compounding factors’ and lead to errors by
breaking established patterns of behaviour. It
disrupts your own mental check list. Putting
bungs in is a normal "first part" of my routine,
but if you get that right 99.9% of the time youwill leave the bung out on the
thousandth trip! Also, not having your
normal crew on board means you don’t
have that "second check". My good mate
Mark Frendin comes from a military
background and is great at checking
everything and when we both go
through a good routine errors are greatly
minimised. Not being in the right head
space is another factor that leads to
errors and in my case dropping the
sounder on the concrete didn’t really do
my inner karma a heap of good!
Provided no injury occurs and the damage is
material rather than injury related, you just
have to learn to get through this stuff. Events
like these make you more careful and lead to
resilience and more careful error prevention in
the future. The one thing I’ve learnt about
boats over many years is that they will always
need something fixed at some time and
breakages are all part of being an angler!
B.O.A.T- bet on another thousand! ●fishingworld.com.au | September 2019 | 51“When I arrived the back of the
boat was curiously low in the water.
Ah yes, forgot to put the bung in!
Second time in over 40 years ...
I dived in, grabbed the bung...”