Safety and sea survival

It isn’t often that you get to save someone’s life, but the safety and sea survival course aims to do just that.  AY editor, Barry Henson, attended one to see what it was like.

How prepared are you for a boating emergency?

How many people have died as a result of ignorance? The Darwin Award books are full of them and they’re just the spectacularly stupid. The ordinarily stupid and ignorant don’t get a look-in, they have to settle for a small article in the local newspaper. The unfortunate reality is that ignorance, you and/or your crew not knowing what to do when something goes wrong, can get you killed.

Let me give you an example of what I mean. Let’s assume that you’re a reasonably experienced sailor.  You’re at the helm of a yacht that’s making a July crossing of Bass Straight.  You’re doing 12 knots downwind in an 18 knot breeze with a symmetrical spinnaker up.  It’s a dark night and the seas are getting lumpy. There is a watch down below asleep and you have three crew members on deck.  You unclip the tether from your harness so you can hand over to one of your crew, suddenly the yacht broaches and you’re over the side.  

The cold water hits you like an electric shock. You surface, sputtering, just in time to get slapped sideways by a wave. What should you do?   

While you’re pondering your answer, let me tell you that a U.S. Coastguard study found that 40% of all man over board situations, even in daylight and good conditions, ends in a fatality. You’re now in 16 degree water, in pitch black, in lumpy seas, and your yacht is pulling away from you, with the spinnaker up, at the rate of 5 metres per second! Count to ten slowly, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10, your yacht is now 50 metres away; in the time it takes you to read these words they’re now 100 metres away and their stern light is disappearing between swells.   

Do you know what to do?  Would your crew know what to do? Would they know how to mark where you went over, stop the yacht, locate and recover you? What if they wrap a line around the prop? Or they don’t search the right area? Or they can’t hear you over the wind? How long do you have before you drown or die of hyperthermia?

I hate to tell you this, but your odds of survival are not good. And the conditions aren’t even that bad, imagine how poor your chances would be if you had 40 knot winds and 20 foot seas, or if only your spouse was on board?  

Before you decide to quit sailing and sell your boat, let me tell you that there are ways for you to dramatically improve your chances of survival in this situation. How? By educating yourself and your crew in safety and sea survival!

Sometimes it takes a wake-up call for people to take action.  For many Australian sailors that wake-up call came on December 28th, 1998. In the ’98 Sydney to Hobart 71 yachts retired, 7 were abandoned, 5 of which sank, and tragically, 6 people lost their lives.  The follow-on enquiry by the CYCA resulted in new rules for Sydney to Hobart participants, and one of those rules was that 50% of all Cat 1 crews and 30% of all Cat 2 crews have to have attended a safety and sea survival seminar.

If you’re a Sydney to Hobart sailor, then there’s a reasonable chance that you’ve done this seminar, but what about the rest of us? It’s obvious why a Sydney to Hobart sailor needs to know about safety and sea survival; the Hobart race is one of the world’s toughest ocean races. But many of us don’t do big offshore races. We may only sail offshore only when the weather is favorable, or only in short coastal hops. Indeed, many sailors do almost all of their sailing on inshore and protected waters. Is this course relevant to them?

Before I answer that question, I should say that until recently I never felt the need to do a safety and sea survival course.  I’ve been sailing for 25 years in Australia, Europe and the U.S. with numerous crossings and nearly 15,000 blue water miles under my keel and, frankly, I got along quite happily without this course. In 25 years of sailing I’d never had a full blown emergency. I’d never lost anyone overboard, never holed the boat, or taken on water.  Through good planning, good maintenance and good fortune I was always lucky – until my boat nearly caught fire.   

My wake up call came on a passage from Poole to Lisbon. We had just finished crossing the Bay of Biscay when we were hit by a strong southerly in the middle of the night (Henson’s law: bad things always happen at night in bloody awful conditions). The boat heeled over so we shortened sail and continued southward. After a couple of hours I decided to motor-sail to charge our batteries. I started the engine and within seconds the engine alarm went off and smoke began billowing from the engine room. I don’t know about you, but a fire on a boat is one of my worst nightmares. After an adrenalin-charged investigation we discovered the source of the smoke was the charred internals of our exhaust hose. The heeling had caused the sea water to back-siphon from our engine cooling system and the hot exhaust fumes and particles had burnt the inside of the hose. We had a very lucky escape from disaster.

As Australians we have a tendency to think ‘She’ll be right’ and most of the time she will be, but it only takes one emergency for you or someone you love to lose their life.  

The safety and sea survival course isn’t about surviving in the water, nor is it about how to abandon ship and survive in a life raft - although all these things are covered in both theory and practice. This primary thing this course teaches you how to be safe, how to handle emergencies, but more importantly, how to anticipate what can go wrong and how to prevent the emergency from occurring in the first place. The emergency could be someone having a heart attack, or a collision, or taking on water, or losing your rig or rudder, or any number of scenarios, but in all cases it is easier to prevent it from occurring than it is dealing with the aftermath

So what does the safety and sea survival course actually cover? To understand it better I attended a two-day program taught by Genevieve White of Marine SafetyWorks. Genevieve is an accredited safety and sea survival instructor, an experienced yachtswoman and ex-Volvo around the world racer with 97,000 offshore miles completed, she has built a successful business offering a ‘turn-key’ safety management solution, including training sailors and crews in a range of safety programs, advising owners on what gear to buy and preparing boats for cat 1 through to cat 7 safety requirements.

Whilst the safety and sea survival program can be tailored to meet specific needs, the base course covers the following:

•    Duty of care and safety planning – what is the safety plan for your boat? How do you create one and what should it address?

•    Emergency planning – this section covers how to respond to various emergencies, who does what and when? And who takes over if the skipper is incapacitated or worse?

•    Yacht safety and survival equipment – we all have safety equipment on board, but does everyone know where it is, when and how to use it.  We got hands-on experience with letting off flares and deploying, entering and righting life rafts.

•    Personal safety and survival equipment – most of us have personal safety equipment, but how well do you know it?  This section examines everything from PFDs to strobe lights, personal EPIRBS, etcetera, and it gives you the opportunity to familiarize yourself with the actual use of these items.

•    Survival procedures – let’s say the worst happens and you need to abandon ship, how do you prolong survival in the water and/or in a life raft?  What should your priorities be?

•    Search and rescue in Australia – how are searches coordinated and conducted?  

•    Emergency communications – this section covers the various types of emergency communications, how and when to issue various radio calls, as well as how to use other types of emergency communications.

•    EPIRBs – what is available, how do they work, when and how should you set them off?

•    Methods of rescue – from accepting a tow to being lifted off by helicopter, this section covers how to coordinate and affect a rescue of your boat, of someone in the water, or of someone off a yacht or life raft.

•    Severe weather – how do you predict and prepare (both mentally and physically) for severe weather?

•    Heavy weather strategies – from sea anchors to trailing drogues to heaving to, this section addresses with the various strategies for dealing with heavy weather.

•    Sail management – what sails should you have on board? How do you maintain and use them?

•    Damage control – emergencies take numerous forms.  What do you do if your boat suddenly starts taking on water, or if there’s a fire on board? Do you have the right priorities? The right damage control strategies?  Do you have the right equipment and know how to use it?

•    Fire at sea – If you’ve ever seen a burnt boat you know how dangerous fire on a ship can be.  Where do they generally start and how can you prevent them from occurring?  If one does occur, how do you extinguish it quickly and with minimal damage?

•    Man overboard – this is every sailor’s worst nightmare.  The most important thing is to stay on board and this course talks about how to achieve that, but if you or someone else does go overboard, how do you rescue them?  And what can they do to prolong their survival?  

•    First aid afloat – injuries on board are a common occurance, but would you know how to manage shock, or hypothermia?

•    Flares – most yachts are equipped with flares, but do you know how and when to use them?  This course gives you hands-on practice.

Each person is going to find topics that are more or less relevant to their personal situation and the type of sailing they do. So is this course relevant to inshore and casual offshore sailors?  

Ultimately, that’s a question you have to answer. If you ask me, I’d answer – without a doubt.  All you need to do is pick up a major metropolitan newspaper on a Monday and you’ll read about someone losing their life on protected waters, or just outside the heads, or during a coastal race. Safety and sea survival isn’t just for Sydney to Hobart sailors, it’s for everyone.

For detailed information on the course, including a list of safety and sea survival training providers near you visit the Yachting Australia website http://www.yachting.org.au/default.asp?MenuID=Training/4/0,Safety_and_Sea_Survival_Course_(SSSC)_/1002/1098/.

Marine SafetyWorks provided tuition to the author free of charge.  Phone 02 9362 4690 or 0402 294 490.