How safe is too safe? | Ian Ridgeway | TEDxMarthasVineyard

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. Through his own narrative of becoming a captain of tall ships, Ian Ridgeway leads us through an exploration of our understanding of risk.

Experiential education programs take students outside of the traditional classroom and use risk as a tool to create lasting impressions. As a result, occasional mishaps occur. But, our perception of danger and where it exists is very distorted. As a consequence, we tend to overreact to accidents, however infrequent, in these types of programs. The fallout of these overreactions is threatening to eliminate sailing based education from existence altogether. Here Ian explains just how tragic of a loss that would be.


Captain Ian Ridgeway's sailing career was born out of The Black Dog Tall Ships' sailing school program. As an eleven year old he went sailing for a week on Shenandoah with Captain Robert Douglas and the Oak Bluffs school on Martha’s Vineyard. As it would turn out, this week marked the beginning of a lifetime love affair with sailing, the ocean, and traditional arts. At a young age Ian rose through the ranks working on Shenandoah becoming first mate for four years from '02 - '06. From 2008 until 2014 he has been the captain of the schooner Alabama leading kids on weeklong educational sailing trips from various ports on the southern New England coast. Ian received his USCG 100 ton near coastal license at nineteen, and graduated from University of Oregon with a degree in Environmental Studies soon after. Though Captain Ian has spent time sailing on many different boats in many capacities, his skills pertaining to sailing and maintaining a traditional wooden vessel comes mostly from his time as an apprentice to Captain Robert Douglas. He has been asked to take over command of Shenandoah when Captain Douglas retires.

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