Equipment Officer
The Equipment Officers oversee management of the equipment owned by the club.
The Equipment Officers needs to ensure the following:
- Current equipment inventory is correctly recorded by the club.
- Club equipment is correctly identified as belonging to the club.
- Club equipment is safe and in good condition.
Current equipment inventory is correctly recorded by the club.
All club boats are recorded in the boat inventory in BoatTrippy. Equipment Officers can add and update this inventory. When adding a new boat, take a picture of it, use image reduction software such as [compressjpeg.com] and [www.iloveimg.com/resize-image] to reduce the file size down to under 500kb. Then mark the boat with a new identity number label (see next section) and a 'THCC' label. Once this has been done, use the Add new inventory item page to add the boat to the inventory. A new identity number will be automatically assigned, but if it doesn't match the number applied to the boat, edit it and change to the number on the boat. Once added, use the 'Upload Picture' button to upload the reduced size picture. This will make the boat available to club members to book for trips.
All non-boat club equipment is listed in the *Other inventory page in this wiki. It is intended that this page will eventually be migrated into the inventory in BoatTrippy. Until then, use the wiki edit features to add new / remove retired non-boat club equipment to and from the inventory.
Note about equipment procurement: Although the equipment officers can procure boats, equipment and parts, it's not the responsibility of the equipment officers to exclusively do all the procurement. If other club officials (reps etc) or members procure boats, equipment or parts for the club, this fine as long as they have pre-approval from the treasurer and let the equipment officers know so they they can be added to the inventory, or parts can be scheduled for fitting. The equipment officers are not responsible for ordering personal paddling items for members. Adding personal items to a club order is done at the discretion of the equipment officers.
Club equipment is correctly identified as belonging to the club
All club equipment should be labelled with 'THCC' to identify that the equipment is owned by the club. Also each piece of equipment should have it's own unique number so that it can be individually identified.
When adding a new boat or piece of club equipment to the inventory, it will need to be assigned a new unique number. For items with non porous surfaces (plastic, metal etc), number labels should be used. We have number labels with numbers ranging from 1 to 408. These can be found in the office. Clean any dust/dirt from the surface before applying to ensure a good bond. For items with porous surfaces (throwlines, BAs, Spray-decks etc) a permanent marker such as a sharpie should be used. For dark porous items such as spray decks, a gold/silver/white marker should be used. For marker numbering, use numbers 409 upwards to avoid duplicate assignments.
Here are the number ranges for boats and equipment:
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Idents are made by taking the prefix from below and appending the identity number (e.g. THCC-WW-38 for a white water boat).
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Club equipment is safe and in good condition.
There are two ways in which boats and equipment are kept in safe and good condition:
Firstly, all club members are responsible for inspecting the equipment before and after they use it and reporting any faults / issues that they find. Details on reporting faults can be found on the Equipment Rules page.
The equipment officers will regularly review the fault list and mark any boats that are no longer trip-worthy as 'In-Repair'. This will prevent members from booking 'unsafe' boats for trips. Once the boats have been repaired, the equipment officers can 'Resolve' the issue and return the boat to the booking pool. If a boat that needs to be marked as 'In-Repair' has one or more future bookings, the equipment officers will need to contact the member(s) and advise them to book another boat. This will free up the boat to be taken out of the booking pool. If the boat turns out to be unrepairable (i.e. it has a large split in the hull) it can be 'retired' which will permanently remove it from the booking pool.
Secondly, the equipment officers are responsible for arranging periodic boat and equipment inspection and maintenance sessions. These are advertised in advance so that club members can volunteer to help inspect the equipment and carry out basic repairs on club nights. Sometimes the repairs will take longer, in which case additional sessions will be advertised where members can arrange to meet outside club hours to make specific technical repairs to boats and equipment (such as re-rigging and compartment sealing of sea kayaks etc). To prepare for the session, the equipment officers will need to prepare a list of boats and equipment that are to be inspected and post this on the forum so that club members know which items not to use that evening. This list will include items from the fault list and items that that are due a safety and condition check (more on this later). This list can also be printed out and displayed at the boat cage. Once repair and inspection sessions are complete, details should be fed back to the equipment officers so that the inventory can be updated as appropriate. Also, anything learned, or new sources for parts should be documented in the Boat Maintenance page.
Safety checks: Boats and equipment need to be periodically checked for safety. An example of this is checking that buoyancy aids remain buoyant by testing with weights in the water. A condition check will ascertain that the item is still fit for purpose and is within it's reasonable life expectancy for it's type. A full list of safety and condition checks and the recommended test frequency will be added here shortly.
