This paper is a personal reflection on the capacity of human beings to tolerate risk. My thoughts were triggered and enriched by an Atlantic crossing under sail aboard the yacht Northern Child. Among the wild men and women of ocean yacht racing, I was forced to reassess my engineering attitudes. In eighteen days at sea I reflected on the factors that determine risk tolerance in a particular enterprise and why tolerance varies so markedly across human endeavours. It occurred to me that the main driver of risk tolerance is emotional rather than technical, a state of affairs that engineers are ill-equipped to manage. This led me to research human decision-making processes and the power of metaphor not only in learning and persuasion but also in synthesising safer systems. Too much happened on this voyage to tell here. Instead I present the set of vignettes that informed my personal belief that engineering knowledge must be broadened to include human behavioural modelling and the synthesis of metaphor. And most important of all, our scope of works must go deeper. In particular, the functional safety discipline must be more than a broad-brush administrative framework. Its tropes must be imprinted on the minds of all the people doing the work.