Tuesday 18^th September

On my desk calendar this week:

A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer

So very true!  Whenever anyone is starting a new job I give them two bits of advice. 

(1)            Send and keep memos re EVERYTHING.  (And by keep I mean keep in a place where you can easily find the info again…)

and…

(2)        be very careful what you write in an email

And that’s it!  I write memos and then print them out and put them on whichever file I am working on, mainly because I absolutely can’t remember anything people say to me on the phone.  So I document each phone call and then, when the time comes to justify my actions, I can whip out the memo and say Aha!  I remember it well!

Pete and I were very careful to log everything on 2XS as well.  We had lots of visitors on the boat, many of them with yachts of their own, and people were always astonished to see that we kept an (almost) unfailing hourly log.  We were more astonished that nobody else does this…

Apart from anything else it gave us a real sense of achievement to see how many nautical miles we had done, which degrees of latitude and longitude we had crossed, how fast we had gone, wind speed, wave height etc etc.  So nice to have it all mapped out in (slightly wobbly) ruled columns! 

On a more sober note…remembering that the rule with logs and memos is to protect the writer…if ever anything goes wrong on a boat it is vital to have info at your fingertips so you can say, At the time my very annoying friend disappeared overboard… well… the waves were huge!  The sun was blotted out by a huge stormcloud/flock of vultures!  The wind changed direction and blew out the mainsail!  And there, in black and white and blue, is the contemporaneous written evidence to bear witness!