Take 2 Bala SC trainers, 4 willing students, 1 Sailing Captain, a mixture of boats and two days of very different weather and what you end up with is a load of new skills and a huge amount of smiling faces!
Over the last few years, the last formal training event of the year has been the “Safety Boat” course. This is an RYA syllabus / certified event that builds on a persons PB2 skills and introduces them to real life hands on recovery situations. This covers all of the craft types that we tend to encounter at Bala SC as well as others that we may come across on the water.
Day 1 started with a bit of a refresher for myself, Jonathan, Eddie and Chris, with Mark and Paul as our trainers quickly getting us to prep two ribs and an O boat to check our memory from PB2 drill and then to get out on the water to do some basic boat handling drill of coming alongside and holding station which were going to form part of our key needs over the two days. After that it was a hands on refresh on “person over board” and also how to lay a mark, once again good refreshers and really getting us comfortable with manoeuvring the RIBS. The weather on the Saturday was warm but a good breeze throwing up a good ranging size of wavelets that really kept us on our toes.
Whilst not a huge part of the membership at the moment, Windsurfers are something we come across on the lake a lot and have had to recover on behalf of the general public where needs have arose. This exercise was to understand how a Windsurfing board is rigged then to go out on the water and recover one including derigging it on the water. Whilst one team was doing this the other was taught how to “tow alongside” using 4 lines and basically acting as a tug (Rib towing an O Boat). This was swapped over so both teams got experience of both the towing and the windsurfing techniques.
During this exercise we did notice a members boat requiring assistance so we popped over to the other shore to hold station for a while then assisted the crew in the increasing winds as they were struggling to get head to wind and the crew member into the boat. It just shows the importance of making sure that when you are out on the water you keep to an area where you are visible and ideally try not to sail when their is not anyone else around. I am a keen advocate of making sure that as a sailing club we have as much safety boat cover as possible and that is only possible due to having courses like this put on to develop our members skills.
After lunch, Paul and Mark rigged a pair of Toppers and back out onto the water for some hands on recovery. The aim was to simulate real life situations so each RIB had 2 people in it (a driver and an assistant) and was allocated one Topper to shadow with a good gap between us. Mark and Paul then just kept capsizing and giving us different situations such as holding station, supporting the mast head and turning head to wind, full turtle etc. Whilst the topper is a smaller craft, it allowed us to practice not just the techniques but working on the communication between Cox, assistant and person in the water (obviously with the cox and assistant regularly swapping over to experience both driving / manoeuvring and the hands on rescue aspect).
As most of our racing is a South Westerly, their is always the chance that a boat and its owner end up on / in the reeds end and due to the shallows, the risk is that a RIB tries to go in and rescue them but does not have sufficient draft to manoeuvre or come out after. In this situation we were shown a technique of anchoring in deeper waters then using a very long line, allowing the boat to drift back in the shallows (but being anchored further out). Once the recovery was done we could then pull the RIB out into deeper waters to exit from there. This was a really good exercise and to be honest something I would not naturally have thought of which is one of the benefits of this course. It starts you really thinking about “breaking the mould” and having a range of skills but also open thinking to apply to recovery situations.
Packing up at the end of Day 1, the general feedback was that we had a blast and learnt loads of good stuff but we had kept dry…. we were quickly advised that the next day was multihulls, larger double handers and a foiling trimaran so we should expect to get wet!
So onto day 2 and the day started off with a nice steady breeze. Before we got the boats prepped (this time just a single RIB and an O Boat), we rigged one of the clubs Dart 16s and the Bahia. Steve Pooley had also arranged to be out of the water at some point to show us how to support the possible needs of a F101 Foiling Trimaran but firstly onto the Darts.
This session almost did not start as Mark started off down the lake and was seen to be having so much fun for a while I think he actually forgot he was running the course with Paul. But once he had created a lot of space down the lake it was time for the first capsize. This was just a normal one (non inverted) so we could see the normal technique a crew would use to bring a Catamaran up (including things such as ensuring the main and jib were un-cleated to prevent it powering straight back up). Whilst this is normally done by the boat crew with safety just holding station, if a crew member was injured or exhausted, it could be the job of the safety boat assistant to bring the boat back up hence the reason for having this demonstrated.
This actually highlighted two key things. The first is that the safety boat assistant is not just a dormant pair of hands in the safety boat. The driver is PB2 trained and is responsible for handling, driving and manoeuvring the boat (as well as managing the situation). They cannot just leave the helm to do “stuff” and therefore are dependent on the assistant to be very active in the recovery and rescue techniques (including getting in the water to assist with boat righting etc). The second is that by doing this first hand it clearly demonstrated that as a club we need to invest as much time in coaching our safety boat assistants as much as we do our cox’s if we want to achieve a position where we are always having a safety boat going out in the water with two people in it. In a lot of these supporting / rescuing situations the cox could not be both positioning the boat and being hands on, therefore it is critical that people understand why when signing up for sailing membership, part of your obligation is 3 duties per year (and if you are not PB2 trained these are likely to be as a safety boat assistant).
The next technique was very interesting (having transitioned to Cats last year) and that was a full inversion. We normally sail with a mast head float but on a few of the bigger opens have had it removed and in that situation the risk of an inversion is very real. Having seen just how hard it is to right an inverted Cat it may be staying on all the time! We were shown 3 techniques these being:
- Crew rights it by applying bodyweight in the correct position (slow but puts the least amount of stress on the rig)
- RIB rights the boat by having the righting line at 90deg to the hulls and reverse drags (really difficult to master)
- RIB rights the boat by having the righting line straight down the hull line, reverse drags so the rear of the hulls dig in the “flips” the boat back over (last resort as this really stresses the rig)
This was such a good part of the course and to be hands on, doing recoveries in a manner where you are under no pressure and can repeat until you get better at it is the perfect way to learn.
It was now time for lunch but as we reached the shoreline we noticed Steve P was out on the water so Paul went to check and it was agreed to do the Trimaran session straight away. It was really good of Steve to do this with us, as approaching it full inverted you realise both its size and complexity of its shape but also what a fragile piece of kit (being carbon fibre), it is. Steve started by giving us a bit of a safety briefing regarding all of the fragile bits but also most importantly the “sharp” bits which could easily puncture the RIB’s hull. This would not have been part of my initial consideration so it was great for Steve to point this out. After this, Steve demonstrated the righting technique. This was really good as once again it demonstrated the adhoc nature of safety boat recovery. Steve’s opening point was that in most cases, the safety boat just needs to hold station and be available. The trimaran once inverted is actually in its most stable stable state so to reinvert it is a real challenge. It is a similar technique to righting an inverted Cat where you apply weight to the rear of one hull and allow it to start to pivot, but unlike a Cat where traditionally you use a righting line, with the F101 a number of lines run under the side tramp so Steve was using these to get leverage. After a number of tries it did not want to hit the tipping point so Steve requested a line from the safety boat, attached this to the adjacent wing stanchion (I think) and used this to get a better leverage. Once again a great lesson of “if the first method does now work, try something different not in the manual”.
Biding Steve farewell we headed back to the club house for lunch and then got ourselves ready to get wet. Once again, we split the attendees across the RIB and the O Boat with the RIB “doing” and the O Boat observing. Mark took the Bahia out to demonstrate how to right a double handed boat where the gunwhale creates a vacuum seal at the point of inversion. For this exercise, Mark asked each of us in turn to sail with him as the crew and then he deliberately allowed the boat to capsize. Once we were both in the water, it was the normal drill to see if we could release the sheets before trying to break the seal by applying weight to a stern corner. Once the boat had come up to sit level it was the normal righting technique with the safety boats holding station. Once we had all taken part in this (and had got wet), we tried two “in boat” techniques using the RIB. The first was to place the bow onto the sponsons of the rib and drive round in a circle, using the resistance of the mast and sail to start the inversion process. At the same time the O Boat followed the rotation, ready to grab the mast head once it broke surface. The second technique was to put a safety line on the shroud, loop it over the hull and then similar to the Cat technique, put the boat with the RIB at 90 deg to start rolling the hull over.
With that done, we called it a day and headed back to the clubhouse for a debrief, packing the boat away and thanking Mark and Paul for a fantastic 2 days training.
I would highly recommend this course as a follow on from the PB2 but more importantly, whilst we were shoreside we actually realised that we do not do enough of this and we have an opportunity next year on the weekends where there is no wind to get a safety boat and a couple of club boats out and use that time to practice the techniques. I would keenly encourage PB2 members and anyone wanting to do safety assistant to put some energy behind this on the whatapp group next year on the days when its to light to sail. It really was great to be hands on without the pressure of race conditions!
I have to close by once again thanking Mark and Paul for their time and also Jonathan, Chris and Eddie for being such great company over the weekend.
Rob Sloggett
Bala Sailing Club 