Posted by Laurence Monkhouse on December 06, 2005 at 21:53:36 from 80.3.128.6 user Laurence_.
In Reply to: Re: RP Duffers as logic posted by John Nichols on December 06, 2005 at 15:59:20:
Surely the essence of dufferishness is acting stupidly and creating your own dangers, not the fact of being overwhelmed by forces beyond your control.
The only really dufferish acts in the story were a) Jim failing to look right and left before crossing the road, b) Jim not having the end of the anchor chain made fast, and c) arguably Jim not letting out enough scope on the anchor chain before leaving the boat for half an hour - as he thought.
The children did not 'set out in a dense fog.' The situation was forced upon them by events. I don't think that the fact that John did not have the basic knowledge of how to let out more chain makes him in any way dufferish. But it could well have led to the theory 'If not duffers won't drown' being disproved, had not John, as John N points out, successfully then done a risk assessment and made the correct decisions.
(Of course AR - lucky him - had never heard of risk assessments. But our generation have now found out that we have been doing them for years without even knowing it!)
Commander Walker's original analysis applied to the use of a stable sailing dinghy on a lake, not to bad weather at sea.