Sailors are a breed apart, in more ways than one. For one, sailing has some serious economic barriers to entry.

Even if the Irish Sailing Association could put every Irish kid who wanted one into a Laser dinghy to learn the ropes, there would still need to be enough spare cash around the house to kit them out and enough spare time to be at leisure to learn. Either way, the kids spending the day in the regatta would be the kids of the merchant class, the lawyers, the doctors and a smattering of Breakfast Roll Men made good . . . you'd look hard for risk-averse types.

Mom working at Dunnes and Dad working security is not likely to mean Sean is out sailing this week.

There's a PhD in sociology to be earned by studying the complex webs of hierarchy and status in the three Dun Laoghaire yacht clubs . . . the Royal Irish, the Royal St George and the National. You've got Old Money, New Money and Prod Money . . . and I'm not going to try and work it all out in this space. To the rest of us, however, it's just Money . . . as in, they've got more than the rest of us.

For about a year I fell in with a crowd who grew up around those Dun Laoghaire yacht clubs, older versions of the kids who were fished out of the water last week. They have common attitudes towards risk and achievement: they love to win, they're more likely than most to be entrepreneurs and they party as hard as any other class of people you're likely to meet.

They have an appetite for risk in 51 flavours, sometimes mixed . . . one of their proudest rights of passage was learning how to light a cigarette in horizontal rain blown by a gale.

They would want to distance themselves from the sailors who told reporters, eager to justify the blaring headlines that would inevitably use the words "tragedy" and "terrified", how scared they were.

They would more likely identify with 14-year-old Ian Byrne from Gorey, Co Wexford, who told a reporter that it was "a bit windy":

"I nearly capsized once but I wasn't really looking at the other boats. I just wanted to finish the race."

Or 19-year-old Conor McAleefe, who did go into the water and characterised the whole experience as "brilliant. There were loads of waves."

More to the point, McAleefe didn't float, wait for rescue and think of suing Met Eireann, the yacht club, his instructor, God and anybody else who should have isolated him from risk. He got the boat back up and sailed home, through waters nearly choked with vessels sent out in the rescue effort.

McAleefe is the Alpha Sailor, the guy . . . though sailing is almost unique in its near-blindness to gender . . . who gets thrills out of managing risk. One day he'll wind up managing a hedge fund or raising money from Dermot Desmond for his startup.

Twenty years ago Desmond invested �1.4m into Sail Ireland, a venture set up by Enda O'Coineen to enter a boat and crew into the Whitbread round-theworld yacht race. As in many things Desmond was ahead of the curve . . . the '90s saw a deluge of corporate money into ocean yachting as the perfect metaphor for the risk-defying masters of the universe and formerly stodgy companies like British Telecom wanted to have some of that risktaking sex appeal rub off on them.

It will be interesting to see how people react over the coming weeks. Last week's bilge of platitudes from ministers and presidents striving to be seen as more caring than each other, stressing that safety must trump all other values, is both untrue and a bit pernicious. The lesson isn't that risk is something you avoid at all costs. The lesson . . . particularly for those who thrive on risk . . . is that you calculate your risk.

And learn to survive the squall.