The Storm Trysail Foundation has made its growing library of Safety-at-Sea videos available online.
For a one-time $40 fee, subscribers will have permanent access to the nonprofit club’s 10 existing videos and new ones as they’re produced. The current selection has videos ranging from three to nearly 30 minutes focused on weather, firefighting, cold-water survival, deploying a life raft and more, amounting to over two hours of content.
The videos are led by experts and the material is intended for all experience and skill levels, said Edward “Buttons” Padin, a club member who helped produce the videos.
“It’s written and produced to educate the everyman of sailors,” he said, adding that the videos are meant to be educational rather than entertainment.
“You can be Joe Fisherman out there and all of a sudden there is a fire down below. What do you do?” he said. “Or you are out there sailing with your wife and you fall over the side. What is she going to do to get you back on the boat?”
The roughly 1,000-member Storm Trysail Club, and its charitable offshoot the Storm Trysail Foundation, is known in some quarters for its Safety-at-Sea seminars held annually at SUNY Maritime’s Bronx campus. While primarily an offshore racing club, the Larchmont, N.Y.-based organization also focuses on training and safety for young sailors.
Its next Safety-at-Sea seminar is in May.
Storm Trysail developed its first videos about three years ago to supplement training offered in its seminars, which were shorted from two days to one. The videos were initially made available only to people who signed up for its seminars with the idea that they would watch them before attending. They were first made available to non-attendees in late December 2016.
“The whole idea was to be able to teach or expose participants at our seminars to certain subjects which we didn’t have to time to treat or treat completely during a one-day seminar,” said Butch Ulmer, past club commodore and chairman of its Safety-at-Sea Seminar Committee.
Club members found several reasons to make the videos available to a wider audience. For one, they’re intended to be useful and promote safety at sea, which is a key foundation goal. They also help bolster the club’s reputation outside the Northeast and the subscription fee offsets the costs of producing the videos, Ulmer said.
Access to the video library is available on the Storm Trysail Foundation website upon registration and payment. For more information, visit stormtrysailfoundation.org.
