Safety at Sea Seminar 2012 – You Need This

Are you planning to do any offshore racing in the next year or two? Do you want to increase your proficiency, safety skills, and confidence on the water, even if you’re not racing offshore? Then the Safety at Sea seminar is for you. For boats competing in the Newport Bermuda race this summer, it is required that 30% of the crew have completed this course within the last five years. But, all the rules aside, I have a lot of really positive stuff to say about this class.

During this seminar, information is shared in a series of lectures and interactive sessions. My comments are based on what I experienced when I attended in 2009. Attendees can go to one or two days worth of courses. The first day is the same for everyone. The second day is optional and there are two different tracks — one for cruisers and one for racers.

I went to the two day course and participated in the racing track on the second day. The first day included topics such as:

Risk Management
USCG Search & Rescue
Damage Control
Offshore Sail Inventory & Storm Sails
Emergency Communications Equipment
Weather Awareness & Forecast Use
Handling Medical Emergencies at Sea
On-the Water MOB Recoveries — The coast guard actually came out and dropped rescue swimmers into the water from a helicopter. Naval Academy personnel also demonstrated different types of rescues with boats on the water. I’m including a YouTube USCG video of a MOB water rescue here too, if you want to see it.

The second day included some lecture topics but also had active participation sessions. Here’s the kind of stuff I did on the second day:

Weather seminar focusing on the Gulf Stream Current & how to navigate through it
Session on how to put out fires — both classroom stuff and individual action using a fire extinguisher to put out a simulated fire.
Time in the pool — We jumped in with our inflatable PFDs on. Just when I thought mine wasn’t going to inflate is when the aspirin tablet dissolved and the inflation triggered. That experience in a non emergency situation was priceless. Once we did that, we each got to right a liferaft — again SO glad I got to do that. We rounded out the pool time with a demonstration of various supplies that should be kept in a ditch bag.
Jury Rigging — Seriously, they gave us a platform (to represent the boat) some rope and a pole to represent the mast and we had to figure out how to get the mast tied down. They also taught us some useful knots in this session.

The complete schedule of Safety at Sea seminars can be found at the US Sailing web site. Here are the dates and locations so far: