What were they thinking?

Some serious questions need to be answered about why the Spirit of Bermudachose to put to sea with a party of schoolchildren on a day when you didn't need to consult a barometer to accurately predict the weather conditions.

A brief glimpse out the window before heading to work on Tuesday morning was sufficient to tell what the day held in store.

After a weekend when Bermuda was buffeted by incessant squalls and raging seas, it was surely clear to most of us that the recent spell of bad weather was continuing and could likely further deteriorate.

And the Bermuda Sloop Foundation, which operates the Spirit, is far better qualified than the man on the street when it comes to not just reading but anticipating the winds and weather.

The undoubted professionalism and skill of the Spirit's crew notwithstanding, it seems — at the very least — that the decision to go ahead with a voyage from the Great Sound to St George, given the high winds and high seas, was somewhat rash.

Under the best of circumstances, the 17 Whitney Institute children aboard the sail training vessel on Tuesday were all but guaranteed to have an extremely uncomfortable journey.

In the event, the trip aboard the 112-foot replica of a 19th-century Bermuda sloop could have ended in catastrophe after its engine was disabled and the vessel found itself adrift off Murray's Anchorage.

With its mainsail also badly damaged, the Spirit was essentially a plaything of the winds and seas until the tugboat Faithful came to the sloop's assistance.

Whitney teacher Jason Wade has rightly praised the Spirit's crew for keeping the school party safe in “a very dangerous situation” and ensuring “a pretty traumatic experience for the kids” was somewhat less traumatic than it might otherwise have been.

By all accounts, the crew behaved in a courageous and entirely selfless manner. Similarly, the Faithful's crew has won plaudits for its courage in coming to the rescue of the stricken Spirit in increasingly violent conditions.

But Mr Wade was not entirely correct when he said the circumstances that led to the vessel's predicament amounted to “a string of events that nobody could have predicted”.

Safety should always be the paramount concern of the captain and crew of a sail training vessel. Certainly, the precise chain of mishaps that left the Spirit crippled and drifting off the Narrows could not have been accurately forecast. However, there was good reason to suspect Tuesday's severe weather would ensure that the schooner's voyage to the East End would be anything but routine.

One Spirit crewman was injured while the schooner was being tossed by the waves and rocked by the extreme winds. And, frankly, luck had as much to do with no one else being hurt as the resourcefulness of the ship's company and the promptness and proficiency of the Faithful in responding to the situation.

It beggars belief that the Spirit's operators were unmindful of the likelihood that they risked sailing into potentially treacherous seas on Tuesday.

That they nevertheless took such a gamble, particularly given that there was a group of inexperienced schoolchildren aboard, should be a cause of no little concern to all Bermuda residents.

Neither the school party nor the ship's crew should have been exposed to dangers that might well have been anticipated, at least in part.

Throughout its relatively short history, the Bermuda Sloop Foundation has repeatedly demonstrated itself to be a credit both to the Island and to the young people it serves with such unflagging dedication.

Doubtless its board is determined not only to preserve the Foundation's good name but to allay any fears in the community about its safety protocols stemming from Tuesday's disturbing incident.

It is therefore imperative that the Foundation provides a full explanation of the reasoning that led to the decision to take the Spirit out in poor weather, which clearly had the potential to not only worsen but worsen badly.

It is to everybody's advantage, not least the Foundation's, that we do in fact know what they were thinking.