[Jeff_H]

Jack,

This reminds of a funny incident that occurred when Ayn Rand was being interviewed by William F. Buckley many years ago. Ayn Rand and Mr. Buckley were actually having a fundimental difference of opinion on a topic. After the intellectual equivilent of ''hollering past each other'' on the topic, William F. Buckley politely said, "Miss Rand, Per the current vernacular expression, ''we seem to be having a failure to communcate''".

Ayn Rand looked him squarely in the eye, and said, "Mr. Buckley, I am communicating perfectly adequately. You are simply failing to comprehend."

That said, I do feel som frustration at not being able to explain the issue in a way that Tjr sees where you and I are coming from. As we have discussed in our offline correspondence on the topic of CE standards, while the standards are intended to quantify certain ''quantifiable'' aspects of what makes a vessel safe to venture offshore, it fails to actually set the kind of comprehensive standards that would completely define all aspects of what makes vessel suitable to venture offshore. It also fails to have the kinds of checks and balances that guarentees that what appears on the forms actually occurs in the specific boats being built.

I can''t recall if I had given this example in our exchange on this topic or if I was talking with someone else on this topic, but the CE standards are somewhat akin to the old Lloyds standards. You would routinely see references to boats being designed "to Lloyds Standards", which mean that the design met LLoyds standard. You would also see boats that claimed to be ''A100 approved'' which meant that drawinsg were subitted to Lloyds and these drawings were approved. The vessel was then supposedly built to the approved Lloyds A100 standard. Lastly, you would see boat that had been Lloyds A100 certified, which meant that the design had been approved by Lloyds in advance and that a Lloyds certified inspector had observed the construction and certified it as being in accordance with the Lloyd Standards and the approved set of design documents.

The EC directive is the equivilent of being Looyds approved but not certified (despite the word confusion that might occur here),

Best wishes,
Jeff