Basic Safety Training

As small-boat sailors we are responsible for our own training

Article by Bryce Potter

As a professional mariner, I’m required to refresh my basic safety training course every five years. I just did a refresher course, and it got me thinking about how beneficial a little basic safety training is for all of us who get out on the water.

As recreational boaters, we tend to pay a lot of attention to safety equipment, but not so much to safety training. Some of this is due to convenience, in that it takes less time and effort to purchase a bit of safety kit than it is to go out and train with it. Some of this is due to the advertising budgets of the manufacturers of safety equipment. The majority of this skewed focus comes from the regulations for recreational vessels, which focus heavily on equipment requirements and tend to completely neglect training. In my home state of Washington, the only training required is a boater education card, which as the name suggests requires education but not training.

What I’m getting at is that as small-boat sailors we are responsible for our own training. What can we learn about basic on-water safety from what the professionals are required to do?

Basic Safety Training consists broadly of three separate topics: Firefighting, First Aid, and Ocean Survival.

Firefighting training consists of a day of classroom theory and equipment familiarization, followed by a day of practical training. The theory is valuable for anyone who might someday have to fight a boat fire. The practical training is wonderful but mostly irrelevant for small boats. It’s a lot of fun wearing full firefighting turnouts and an SCBA (Self-Contained Breathing Apparatus) while dragging charged hoses down ladders into a burning engine room, but it doesn’t have much applicability to small boats. The part that we all really should partake in at some point is the fire extinguisher training. This is one of those things where the difference between never having done it and having done it a few times is huge. After watching numerous students go through training, most of them aren’t very effective on their first attempt, but by their third or fourth time they are so good it’s almost boring. If you haven’t ever used a fire extinguisher before, get down to your local fire station and ask if they do live fire extinguisher training. On a small boat all we may get is one quick shot with an extinguisher before we have to retreat to the water. If you’ve never put out a fuel fire with an extinguisher before you have to do it for real, the odds of making the situation worse rather than better are pretty high. Get down to your local fire station and get some training.

If your firefighting efforts fail, we’re on to ocean survival skills. For the most part small-boat sailors tend to be pretty good at this one, since we spend so much time sailing on boats that are smaller than most commercial liferafts. It’s still well worth testing your survival plan. You have a dry suit? An immersion suit? Great! Do you always wear it? Can you put it on in the water? What if you’re wearing it half on with the arms tied around your waist? An old captain of mine was last seen by his crew wearing his immersion suit half on with the arms tied around his waist when the ship foundered. He was never found. Learn the limitations of yourself and your equipment before you need it for real. I highly recommend playing in a swimming pool if you can find one that will allow you to bring your gear (and maybe even your boat) down and put it in the water. When I learned to sea kayak on the Maine coast in late April we spent a week in the pool practicing rescues and rolls in a relatively warm and safe environment. When we later did it in the cold ocean it was easy, despite the cold and the waves. Again, a little bit of quality training goes a very long way.

The final side of the basic safety training triangle is first aid. This doesn’t have to be complicated. A basic first aid and CPR course can be done in one day. If you can do it, I highly recommend a Wilderness First Aid course. Anytime we’re on the water we are our own first responders, so it pays to have some skills for when help is far away. If you have the time and inclination, a Wilderness First Responder course takes about 70 hours of classroom time and provides superb training in providing quality first aid by improvising with the materials that you have on hand. It is excellent preparation for anyone who spends a lot of time away from urban areas.

Safety training is a very deep rabbit hole that I’m still exploring after two decades of being on the water for both work and pleasure. However, these are the basics. Can you confidently put out a fire, patch up a busted up sailor, and survive at sea without your boat? If so, great! You can continue to refine and expand those basic skills until the day you put into your final berth. If you can’t do these confidently, and teach others to do them, that’s great too! You have some fun training ahead of you. True confidence is exhilarating like nothing else in the world, partly because it takes real time and effort. You can buy safety equipment, but you can’t buy confidence and skill. Happy training! •SCA•

First appeared in issue #108