Oh, I’ve been talking about this for so long! It’s been nearly two years since I decided to go down the kayaking leadership route and at long last, I’ve got my first actual qualification on that route! I finally did my Paddlesport Safety and Rescue course – in fact, it’s been so long that the course used to be Foundation Safety & Rescue Training. I was hoping to do it in August somewhere around Southampton but I dithered and didn’t book it and by the time I did, it was sold out and I had to find somewhere else, which meant a two-hour drive first thing on a Friday morning to the other end of Hampshire.
It was a nice warm sunny day – this is particularly relevant not just because my nationality compels me to talk about the weather but because we had to spend the afternoon in the Basingstoke Canal, which is not something you want to do on a cold miserable day. We started with the theory part of the day. I thought that would be in some kind of classroom, even if it’s just the front room of the outdoors centre but no, it was on garden chairs outside, behind the boat trailer, which had a whiteboard attached with a little system of cords and karabiners. First up, this is a training course, not an assessment course – or to put it another way, you can’t fail unless you flat-out refuse to leave the bank. Second, we covered all the safety stuff. That is, what are the things you should be aware of. This covered environmental and user hazards, so things you’d encounter in sheltered water, like moored craft, angry wildlife, other water users, weirs, disease and so on. My classmates were a SUPer from Oxfordshire who wants to help schools get out on the water more and an apprentice outdoors instructor who is almost definitely going to teach both kayak and SUP but spent his day on the SUP. Both of them are likely to be on rivers and occasionally lakes. I’m not. I’m a sea kayaker. When I go out on my own or with a group as a tourist, that’s going to be on the open sea. When I’m at the boathouse, in my role as assistant instructor, it’s going to be in a very sheltered corner of the harbour but the sea nonetheless. That means I have different hazards to be aware of – cross-Channel ferries, idiot tourists on jet skis, tides, that sort of thing. It also means my path to instructorship may be a bit different to the others’. I’m probably not even looking at Sheltered Water, let alone Very Sheltered Water.
Next was to talk about rescue. We’ve looked at things that can get us into trouble. Now we have to talk about how to deal with those problems. What do you do, from least risk to most? Well, the safest thing to do is to keep away. Look after yourself first. You’re the person who knows how to rescue, it’s vital that you don’t turn yourself into a casualty. Look after the rest of the group second. Make sure you don’t create any more casualties. Third, turn to the casualty. Fourth, when all humans are dealt with, you can turn to the equipment. Kayaks can be replaced. So, in the spirit of not putting yourself in harm’s way, you shout. Doesn’t have to be aggressive, but you talk them through what you want them to do, whether that’s to let go of the boat and just float on their back, or whether it’s talking them through how to get back in. A panicked casualty could easily capsize you. Second, reach. I’d put this third but whatever. It means give them something to hold onto – your paddle, a rope, a floating thing on a rope, whatever. Third, throw. Throw them something to hold onto. A football, a spare buoyancy aid, a lifebelt, whatever. Fourth, row – these are the boat-based rescues we’re going to spend the day learning. And fifth, go. That means getting in the water, which is your last resort preferably to be used only if your casualty is unconscious. A go rescue, anything that involves you leaping in the water yourself, is highest risk. I did a reach rescue after lunch, when a kayak got let go by accident and I retrieved it by grabbing a paddle and pulling it back. Small reach rescue but nonetheless.
Actually, there’s only so much you can say about rescue before you hae to start doing. One thing I do remember talking about was SUP leashes. Official guidance from British Canoeing, the governing body for all things paddlesport, is that ankle leashes basically shouldn’t be used. During rescues, even self-rescues, they can be so difficult to undo that they’re more dangerous than they’re worth. Use a waist-mounted leash with a quick-release mechanism in more sheltered water and – apparently, don’t quote me here, check it for yourself – no leash at all in whitewater. I SUP a little. I have my own board and on warm evenings, I take it down to a shallow river and because I’m a bad example, I don’t wear the leash. It gets in my way. I get tangled in it. We also talked about the minimum you should be wearing. A buoyancy aid at all times, especially if you’re instructing and therefore representing British Canoeing. Something on your feet. Even on a SUP in warm weather, shorts & t-shirt are better than a bikini – or indeed, better than reminding us of those photos of Orlando Bloom that we’d all tried to forget. Wetsuits are good, though. Cags, in windy weather. Rash vests don’t do much apart from provide a comfortable layer between something that might rub and bare skin.
So, one instructor, two SUPers and one kayaker. What did we take out on the water? Two canoes, three paddleboards and three kayaks. All of that had to be carried across the road and “yeeted”‘ into the water. Yep, 44-year-old instructor was quite adamant that the one tie the word was truly appropriate was when you were putting a SUP into a water and tying it up. The new PSR course is a little different to the old FSRT. You do all the rescue from your preferred craft, so I have to learn everything in a kayak. The others have to learn everything on a SUP. In FSRT, you have to learn all the rescues from all the craft, so people have to be pulled in and out of kayaks, SUPs and canoes all day and it’s quite the faff. On the other hand, I’m not accustomed to playboats and found I had numb legs within about ten minutes, so the rest of the day was looking like fun. I definitely wished many times that I’d said I like SUPs.
We started with towing. First, the really basic simple systems of just nudging each other from one bank to another, then moving on to various contact tows. Where is it best to hold? What shapes do the two craft form on the water that make it easier or more difficult? How can your casualty help? I’m an old hand at the contact tow by now, but adjusting it to tow a SUP or a canoe is a bit of a thing. They’re both too wide to paddle over in a way that I’ve more or less mastered with a second kayak. Honestly, I spent a huge part of the day reminding myself “You’ll never need to use this so it doesn’t matter if you’re bad at it. We only use kayaks”. But I admit that one of our assistants does take out a canoe and while I don’t think we’re going out in conditions that are going to result in him getting in trouble, I suppose it’s not a terrible thing to know.
Then the instructor produced a variety of towing systems, from the waistbelt I used on my sea kayaking course to a long sling with a karabiner on it to an actual length of rope. In all cases, it needed to be quick-release, preferably on the part of the rescuer, the reasoning being that your casualty won’t necessarily be in a fit state to be the one in charge of the safety aspects of the rescue. So you clip your line onto the casualty’s craft and maybe you sling it around one shoulder. Putting it around your body is more secure but under pressure, it’s not quick-release. If you’re on a SUP, you can kneel on it. This was my first hint that everything in a kayak was going to be harder than on a SUP. You can’t turn sideways, you can’t get your weight over anything, you can’t put proper pressure on anything. And yeah, you can’t kneel to hold a towline.
We had a quick break for lunch and then the instructor kept talking while we finished eating. It’s not a first aid course and I don’t know if he’d be qualified to teach it anyway, but here’s my first aid kit. What about calling for help? The SUPer started with location and What Three Words. Instructor says “Ooh, controversial” and I did the “Oooh” face. If, like her, you haven’t heard – What Three Words may be lovely and accurate in that it directs you to a tiny area of three square metres but it’s also incredibly easy to mistranslate over a phone. You say “there” and the other person hears “their”. You say “bear” and they hear “pear”. Someone makes it or doesn’t make it plural by accident. In writing, fine, but over the phone in an emergency situation, it can get very muddled very easily. Various Mountain Rescue organisations are desperate to get the message out to please use grid reference, not What Three Words. It’s just as easy – instead of opening the W3W app, you open the OS Locate app (App Store | Google Play Store). It works off the GPS, so you don’t need any phone signal, it’s much clearer to just read out prefix plus six numbers than it is to try to spell out your three words (and I know you don’t know the NATO phonetic alphabet as well as you think you do) and in general, it’s just better. You can also give coordinates (get these from your map app) or if you’re somewhere even vaguely urban, street addresses will do the job just fine too. No, they almost definitely won’t send a helicopter. Well, in my part of the world, they might, given that we’re talking about being out on the sea, not on a river. It’ll be coastguard rather than air ambulance but it’ll do the same job – both helicopters deliver their casualties to the same bit of field next to the boathouse to be taken to hospital by road.
Back on the water for the “very wet” part of the day. I kept dry at first, actually. We did the SUP rescues. That’s pretty easy. Talk them back onto the board, help them back onto the board etc. In the event of an unconscious paddler, you have to fling yourself into the water, turn their board upside down if it isn’t already, pull them up so the board is up to their armpits, climb onto the board, grab their wrists and basically fall backwards off the board, which will flip it up the right way while also rolling them onto it. Then, you preferably want someone to tow you back to the bank because you’ll probably be too busy holding onto your casualty to paddle.
Translate that to a kayak. Yeah, leap out of the kayak, get the casualty onto their board. It’s pretty difficult to get a casualty onto a kayak, or at least an unconscious one. You can get them to hang onto the nose (or tail) of the kayak but they need to be in a fit state to do that. We’ve done it at boat club once or twice, usually when a boat has either capsized or got filled with water. Kid holds onto me while the coach drains and rights the kayak and then we get her back in. For returning to shore, it’s always been contact tow so far.
We practiced emptying a kayak, which in the cases of all crafts means flipping it onto its side, getting its nose onto your craft, pulling it upside down across the deck to drain it and then flinging it back up the right way before helping the casualty in – fling because it has to turn up the right way without scooping up a load more water. Same for canoe. Now, a canoe is an absolute pig to turn over and even more so to get onto the nose of your kayak but when it comes to moving it across, to get both ends out of the water and therefore to drain it, the instructor was absolutely right that you move yourself across under it, rather than try to pull it across you. Once it’s up, it’s really easy to empty. Clean and jerk to fling and roll it back into the water is another matter but getting it emptied, great.
Hand of God is an absolute pig too. Reach across an upside down kayak, push down on the bottom and pull up on the top and roll the thing over. I can’t do it. I can just about do it if I’m out of the kayak and standing in shallow enough water that I can reach the bottom comfortably. Deep water, no way. This is how you deal with an unconscious kayaker – they’re easier to tow if they’re lolling in an upright boat, so it’s easier to roll them than to free them. Poor instructor spent forever upside down in the canal as I tried and tried and failed and failed to flip the thing. We had two methods of giving up – either I bang on the bottom and he rolls upright or he bangs on the bottom to tell me to get out of the way as he rolls up. Both were deployed.
And last, entrapped canoeist. If they’re conscious and doing the Pirates of the Caribbean thing under there, you tell them to wrap themselves around whatever they can find and flip it in much the same way you do when you’re draining it. If they’re unconscious, you can lift the side to peek underneath and see what’s going on. In our practice, the peek made the “unconscious” instructor float free and we were able to drag him onto a SUP to take him to shore and deal with the canoe later. Your casualty may not, in which case, yeah, just flip it. Get them out of the water. I can’t flip it in the correct way but I can get it most of the way over if I pull it away from me.
Good thing it’s training and not assessed because I would have failed most of it. He told us about the Instructor course. Now, from what I’ve read, I thought it was about the fun of learning to run sessions, introduce stuff in a playful way etc. Safety & rescue has all been dealt with through the prerequisite PRS session. Nope. Instructor is assessed as you go along and it includes three timed rescues, all of which have to be completed within three minutes. Right now, I’d struggling to complete most of them at all, let alone within a time limit. So I know I’m not ready for Instructor yet and that I’m maybe going to have to see what I can do in a pool over the winter before looking at Instructor next summer. It’s been good to learn that much.