We’ve been talking a lot about risk these past few weeks. How it’s seen, how it’s reported, and how it’s understood. Who is ultimately responsible. When does “risk” begin, and when does it end?
Out of curiosity, I looked up the formal definition: “Risk is the combination of the probability of an event happening and the impact or consequence of that event.” In other words, what actually happens can differ significantly from what we expect to happen. Risk, put simply, is complicated — and it looks different depending on where you’re standing.
What CHIRP Found
In June, the CHIRP Superyacht Feedback Newsletter took on this exact theme in “Staying Alert to Risk.” One of the incidents it highlighted involved distractions during anchoring. As the report put it, “Anchoring operations require full concentration from both the bridge and forecastle teams.” Anchoring is a team effort that depends on trust, foresight, experience, and good judgment — and the more information a crew has at their fingertips, the better equipped they are to make those calls.
What Our Captains Survey Found
Our own Captains Survey turned up something that echoes this: 58% of the captains we spoke with experienced at least one near-miss during their summer season. (The Near-Miss Data Nobody Sees)
That number matters, because near-misses carry lessons. They surface operational pressures, environmental conditions, and decision-making challenges before those factors escalate into something more serious — exactly what the CHIRP report illustrates.
The Reporting Gap
Many safety-critical industries lean heavily on near-miss reporting for this reason: it lets organisations learn before an accident happens, not after. Aviation is the best-known example. Superyachting faces a harder version of this challenge. Near-misses are usually handled internally, crews rotate frequently, owner confidentiality is a real constraint, and there is still no universal, anonymous reporting framework across the sector. The result is that valuable operational knowledge often stays locked within individual boats and crews, instead of being shared more widely.
Where This Leaves Us
Which brings us back to where we started: when does risk begin, and when does it end? Perhaps the honest answer is that it never fully ends — it simply moves from one set of hands to the next, shaped by how much information those hands have to work with. The more near-misses we can surface, learn from, and share across the industry, the fewer surprises we leave for the next crew, the next season, and the next anchorage.
