Personal Minimums: An Idea Worth Borrowing from Aviation
Make the go/no-go call clear-headed and in advance — not on the dock with the engine running
Every Coast Guard and Auxiliary boat crew already operates inside a solid risk-management framework. Before a mission we run the numbers — Team Coordination Training, the GAR 2.0 “green-amber-red” risk assessment, and a crew brief. These tools work. But, to the best of my knowledge, there is one idea from the aviation world that boating has never quite adopted, and it may be worth a conversation: personal minimums.
In aviation, a personal minimum is a limit a pilot sets for themselves — stricter than the legal or regulatory minimum — and writes down ahead of time. A pilot might decide, on a calm afternoon at the kitchen table, that they will not fly if the ceiling is below 2,000 feet, if visibility is under five miles, or if the crosswind exceeds twelve knots, even when the rules would technically allow it. The specific numbers are not the point. The point is that the decision is made in advance, in a clear-headed state — not in the moment, when weather, fatigue, and the pressure to ‘get there’ are all pushing the wrong way.
Pilots have a name for what personal minimums guard against: ‘get-there-itis,’ the very human tendency to press on because someone is waiting, because you have come this far, because turning back feels like failure. On the water we know the same pull. A case is pending, someone may be in trouble, the crew is eager, and the coxswain and crew are asked to weigh sea state, wind, visibility, water temperature, daylight, and crew fatigue all at once, with the clock running.
So here is a modest proposal for our flotilla. What if, well before the season, each of us — and each boat crew — sat down and wrote an objective abort checklist? Not a replacement for GAR or for the coxswain's judgment, but a personal backstop agreed to in advance: seas above a set height, sustained winds above a set speed, visibility below a set distance, water-temperature and exposure limits, or a hard daylight cutoff. When a real limit is crossed, the decision has already been made, calmly and ahead of time, and no one has to make it under pressure with a swimmer in the water and a crew watching.
The Coast Guard's culture already leans this way. ‘We have to go out, we don't have to come back’ is a line about duty — but the modern service pairs it with disciplined risk management precisely so that crews do come back. Personal minimums are simply one more way to put the hard thinking where it belongs: before you cast off. It is a conversation worth having at a meeting this fall.