Winter Misery 101: River Safety

We're all between swims, so we may as well do something to prepare for the next one. There will be numb toes, unresponsive fingers, leaky gaskets and maybe a few tears, but we're doing it anyway!

Quite a few of us have done an SRT course within the last year, but the skills from those courses only stay current if we practice them, so I'd like to spend at least a day out on the river practicing personal safety skills and basic rescue. What we'll try to get through will depend on the group, but will likely cover:

- Swiftwater hydrology basics

- Hazard identification

- Risk assessment and group decision-making

- Low to high risk rescue options

- Personal and rescue equipment

- Whitewater swimming techniques and self-rescue

- Shallow-water crossings

- River knots

- Throwbag practice

- Mechanical advantage systems

We also might get to cover:

- Contact rescues

- Strainer simulations

- River access techniques

- Kayak self-rescue and partner rescue

There's a compulsory theory session attached to the workshop, we'll do it during the week in the clubrooms. This will have some hands-on elements and I'll try to get other people involved in leading the discussion rather than lecturing. Expect this to take ~2 hours. If the weather is decent, we can also practice throwbags in the park (after a brief pitstop at the pub). 

My plan for the Saturday practical is to limit our time in wet gear as much as possible. We'll have two sessions with a decent break between them. Each one starts with a theory refresher and a clear plan of what we'll be doing, then once we're in our gear and wet, we'll just keep blazing through the session, then go warm up.

Once we have a group together we can decide what we want to do on the Sunday, maybe a rafting/kayaking trip nearby. Depends where we go, water levels, weather, stoke levels, all that jazz.

IT WILL BE COLD! YOU WILL BE MISERABLE!

I guess just be ready for that, we'll see what kind of gear we can scrounge together. 

Fill out this form with preferences for date, time, what we want to cover, etc: https://goo.gl/forms/bXyLD151bIymbqUO2

Let me know if you want to help run this, I'd ideally like someone else to take this over and I can just supervise.