BCU Basic WWS&R Course with Plymouth Uni

February 13th-14th 2010 – White Water Safety And Rescue Course

I arrived for 9.00am at the River Dart Country Park, where I met my clients a group of enthusiastic students from Plymouth University. Amongst the crowd there were some familiar looking faces.

We kicked off with a rather cold and windy theory session in the grounds of the park, where we went through equipment, what works what doesn’t work and everything else in between. Some throw bag theory with plenty of practice, followed by a couple of laps of the famous Anaka Rice throw bag assault course.
Everybody enjoyed a very welcomed hot soup for lunch, before we headed back outside to go over a number of the practical elements of the course. Live bait, rescuing swimmers, and offensive and defensive swimming.

Sunday morning arrived and I was really concerned about the state of the water, the river was at the lowest level I had seen it all winter. There really was no flow in it, anywhere, so I made the decision to head to the Exe and use Forepines weir as our training site. The Exe hold its water for a lot longer than the Dart and I had been there quite a bit over December, doing some endurance training for slalom, so I knew that it should work, even at this desperately low level.

So off to the exe we went and who was in town Mr Alex Nicks, fresh back from New Zealand, fuelled with new adventures and stories of the West Coast paddling mission he’s just had, whilst the rest of us had been enduring (the big freeze) in the UK.

Using Forepines as a site for the course worked out quite well, we covered the rest of the course elements. I then set up a number of scenarios where the group would use their newly acquired skills and put them to test in a semi realistic scenario. All in all a good course, a shame about the low water, but we definitely did the best we could do, given the circumstances.

Deb@Gene17