After an unscheduled night swim, Phil Sampson goes back to school with an RYA Sea Survival Course
With ten years of boating and a Day Skipper qualification under my belt (not to mention being W an avid viewer of Saving Lives At Sea and the equally gripping Deadliest Catch), I thought I was fairly well aware of the potential hazards of putting to sea. But of course accidents pay scant regard to all that, and the night my wife and I found ourselves bobbing around in the pitch black after a poorly executed transition from a tender to our boat was something of an epiphany for us.
It wasn’t so much that we had lost our footing and gone in. We know that’s always a possibility, so we were both wearing lifejackets. It was two other factors that really took us by surprise.
Firstly, we had never experienced our autoinflating lifejackets in operation; and secondly, we had no real plan for how to get out of the sea and back onto our boat.
In the event, our lifejackets certainly did their job. The buoyancy they provide is more than adequate but that only served to highlight the fact that our crotch straps were far too loose. As a result, our jackets rose up above our ears, which is by no means that useful in an emergency. After tightening our cords (which is simply a matter of tugging the forward strap downwards) we realised the only way to board the boat was to deploy the bathing platform ladder. And it was at that point, as I was fumbling in the darkness, that I vowed to sign up for the RYA Sea Survival course.
LESSONS LEARNED
The course I opted for was delivered by the Hamble School of Yachting (HSY). This was partly because the timing suited me and partly because they are based in Mercury Marina, just down the road from our Hamble base. Despite its name, HSY also caters for motor boaters. That said, of the 15 delegates on my course, every one of them except me was a yachtie. Some were on a 17-week Yachtmaster course, some were in training for the annual trans-Atlantic ARC event and some were simply attending in a bid to refresh their sea survival skills.
In addition to examples of best practice and lashings of common sense, the course syllabus draws heavily on the lessons learnt from past maritime disasters, most notably the 1979 Fastnet race. That year, 15 yachtsmen lost their lives, seven of them after taking to their liferafts. Subsequently, it was discovered that all seven came from yachts which were still afloat, leading to one of the course’s key takeaways – your boat is your best liferaft. Do not abandon ship unless it’s sinking or is uncontrollably on fire.
LIFERAFT ETIQUETTE
In spite of the advice above, liferafts do still form an integral part of the RYA Sea Survival course and
