Category: General

I’ve just completed FSRT Provider Training (also called Orientation for some reason). It was a course run by British Canoeing (BCU) and taken by Sean McGrath at Teesside White Water Course.

February is not a great time to run this course, it involves prolonged exposure in the water. I had to buy a drysuit for the course which along with a fleece under layer and a skull cap and wet shoes still meant my hands froze off. But I’m quite pleased at how my fragile head didn’t give in.

There were 6 of us on the course, two of us club coaches and the rest professional canoe coaches. I was surprised to find you can be a WWS&R provider before you can be a FSRT provider.

Anyway here’s some notes for my own use and anyone else who’s interested.

Ratios are 1 staff to 6 students. Often run as 2 staff with 9 to 12 students.

The aim is to give students a solution to every problem on the syllabus. Some solutions may be more appropriate for different students depending on strength of rescuer, strength of swimmer, craft used etc so providers will need to know them all. Some solutions can be used for multiple jobs.

All BCU courses take longer to run the syllabus properly than the recommended time allows. Ideally run FSRT over 2 days or split over several but usually it’s run over 1.

Self rescue on the course notes can still use another paddler e.g. Eskimo rescue or asking for help with their craft.

We started by discussing some basic points to teach for clothing, Canadian boats, kayaks. For Canadian boats I came up with buoyancy in both ends (at least), grab handles at both ends on strong points, pinters of appropriate length at both ends and ready to deploy and know the fittings of your boat. We played a game of explaining it while the other person said Kabaddi repeatedly in one breath (an Indian game) to check it was concise enough.

We did tows. For a Canadian tow knees on the other boat’s painter (or quick release knot).

When doing shout to rescue make eye contact and use the other person’s name.

Throwlines always need lots of practice. Re-throws lots more (although they’re rarely used). One technique shown was to make large coils on ground then a handful of small coils in hand then wrap those coils in the throw bag, pick up the other end and throw the bag hard and overhand.

My paddle presentation Eskimo rescue failed because the paddle slipped off. It’s not normally used in general purpose kayaks however.

Getting a swimmer into a kayak or Canadian can be done with a straight lift by the swimmer into boat, heel hook also available but can be more faffy. It can be done with the swimmer going over your boat as a step up method.

Emptying a full kayak needs far hand at front of cockpit lifting up and near hand on side of boat pushing down. When empty swing onto your boat to sea-saw but if there’s still water in the back (if it has a convex back then the buoyancy bags will leave a gap) then don’t lift it on either get help or just leave some water in it. Use the near knee and lean under the boat and ratchet on to bring the boat over, don’t lift.

To rescue an open Canadian or sea kayak turn it upright in the water, go to the bow and put the craft at 45 degrees to your own then rotate boat away from you and use knee or gunwale to lift it and empty.

We played a game of running hugs, naming a person who then stayed still and you turn to be parallel and paddle alongside them and hug them to stop. Practice for positioning near their boat.

For unconscious paddler rescue tell the victim to play dead, let body go limp, hold nose and head raises to back of boat when upside down. Tell them to stay dead when uprighted so you can check airways. In real situation you’d need to jump out of boat if you didn’t get them upright. I told students to bang on boat if it wasn’t working. In real situation you’d make rafts to push them into shore.

My progression plan is to write lesson plans including teaching points/learning outcomes for each of the syllabus points.

Now I need to observe some courses being run then be observed.

I went to the British Canoeing Event Safety Workship last night run by Dave Rosseter and the SCA.  Here’s some notes for my own interest and memory.

Events runs by SCA affiliated clubs are covered for liability by the Perkins & Slade Insurance so if someone dies at an event the insurance covers you being sued.  Following some incidents the insurance company asked for this workshop to happen so clubs at least have an idea how to check the events they run are safe.

An event is defined as an activity run by the club involving non-club members and outwith the BCU terms of reference. (Or run by an SCA committee.)

When running an event we have a duty of care to look after those involved.

We discussed a chain of responsibility which typically has an event organiser in the middle and club committee and SCA above them and volunteers below them.

We discussed the need to get authorisation of events, at a club that might be by the committee or at an AGM.

We discussed risk assessments which for each risk should include likelihood and seriousness as well as mitigation and whether that mitigation is proportionate.

We look at the 5 stages of an event

• Decision to run – why do you want to run it?
• Application and Authority – internal (club committee, safety officer) and external (property owners etc)
• Pre-event considerations (roles needing filled, equipment needed, briefing volunteers, facilities needed, training needed)
• Day of event (people in the right place, what happens when something unexpected occurred)
• Post event (review afterwards and where that review needs to be sent)

There was a slide about checklists for events but not much details.  I found one on the HSE website: checklist for village and community halls.

The acronym CALM was covered which are principles involved in dynamic risk assessment (and are similar to leadership principles of CLAP):

• Commuinication
• Avoidance
• Line of Site
• Management

There was a slide on people’s roles and span of control but not much detail on this.

There’s a load of resources that are due to come out to us. Useful stuff is on the HSE website and the gov.uk website such as the guide to organising community events.

It was an interesting enough workshop but I’m not convinced I learnt much, we already do all this in our club and many of the topics weren’t gone into in much detail.

Interesting to see British Canoeing use a photo from the FCC website in their slides, I wonder who authorised that and what their span of control was.

A decade ago someone from Edinburgh Council’s Statutory Repairs body looked at the back wall of the tenement flat I live in and pointed out a bunch of repairs to the stonework that needed fixed.  They wouldn’t fix them because it wasn’t a danger to the public, instead they did the equivalent repairs to the front which cost about £15000.

Earlier this year one of my more useful neighbours had got some repairs done to the roof and the scaffold meant we could do these repairs easily.  So I got the quote and got a majority of neighbours to agree to it and the repairs were done.  It was a patch-up job with cement rather than whole new stones so the cost was less than £3000.  Do I get thanks and prompt payment from all the owners who’s property I have fixed and in many cases who have taken on the job of maintaining the property? Let’s count, out of my 10 neighbours I had:

3 who paid and said thanks

3 who silently paid at the last minute after sending grumpy sounding e-mails

1 who spent a month saying his agent would pay while his agent spent a month saying they hadn’t heard from him and who eventually paid late

2 who paid late after I had to call a meeting with them at which they complained about everything they could think of but nothing relevant to payment of these repairs

1 who paid silently at the last minute just before I was about to take him to court

This last chap is Robert Fyfe who came to me before he bought the flat from property shark Charles Lovatt who sold his flat off quick while blocking the repairs that needed doing so he didn’t have to pay.  I told Robert about all the repairs that needed done and he bought the flat anyway.  Companies House shows a string of failed businesses of his and he seems to have moved into being yet another property shark and is now renting out this flat.  To rent it out you would need to do a property survey before the start of the rental to ensure the building complied with the Repairing Standard so assuming he’s complying with the law he will be more than aware of what repairs needed doing.  On sending the bill he complained that I had “taken the lead” in this, which is true enough and that he would be speaking to his lawyer (which is just his sister).  When no payment arrived I spoke to his tenant and got a grumpy e-mail from Robert saying that I shouldn’t ever speak to his tenant, I replied that I would speak to my neighbours whenever I liked.  I tracked him down at another property he was selling and asked why he hadn’t paid, he just said it was “in the hands of my lawyer”.  I gave him two weeks to pay before I would fill in court papers and sure enough today I checked and he has paid without thanking or informing me and without the interest that is due on late payments.

I’m exhausted.  We live in a society where we can’t even look after the buildings we own and share.  Those who do get hassled and left out of pocket for it.

The law needs changed to make owners responsible to their neighbours for maintenance and to make landlords policed by the council as part of their registration.  The sense of self entitlement is too big for neighbourly repairs to work otherwise.

I went on a coach’s polo support module training day kindly organised and subsidided by the SCA. It was delivered by Zoe who came up from Wales for the day to 10 people who were mostly experienced polo players but at least 1 was new to the discipline. The idea being to train up coaches in how to coach polo so coaches will go a teach other people.  Here’s some notes about what happened for my own memory and anyone else who cares.

We started with introduction bingo, Zoe had written some features in a square such as “has paddled on the sea” or “has paddled internationally” and we introduced ourselves by finding people to put names to for each box.

We looked at warm ups on the land.  2 people standing back to back passing the paddle over the head and down to feet, then passing it round the side in a mock bow rudder movement. We stood in a line one infront of the other and passed the ball over head, through legs then both alternatively.  We played paper, scissors & stone with warm up forfeits.  Then the two lines faced each other and we passed the ball to the front of the other line then ran to the end of that line.  We passed the ball between two people facing each other being mindful to throw with a loose wrist following the ball and catch by slowing the ball down during the catch.

Always warm up slowly especially when passing, it’s very tempting to throw the ball as far as possible which will over-exert the muscles.

On the water we did more passing concentrating on accuracy with finger pointing at end of throw and catching 1 handed taking the speed off the ball.

Tig, in an area, catcher with ball has to hit the opposition’s boat, can be defended with paddles and body, if the player gets hit then they join the catcher team.

Two lines facing each other of paddlers side-by-side then 1 person paddles down middle passing in zig zag to each boat.

Passing on the move paddling side-by-side to hands.

We used the static 2&2 formation with 1 goal keeper, 2 defenders in a ^ shape infront and 2 more infront of that.  The attacks against this are “overload” where several players attack all from 1 side, “split” where 2 attackers try to get into the middle and move the defenders apart and “star” where each attacker goes to 1 defender to draw them out and they pass it round in a circle between them.

We did ball control, you can bring the ball towards you by putting the blade on the ball then pushing down on your paddle to roll the ball towards you and up the shaft. You can also pick up the ball with your paddle blade.  We did the exercise of moving the ball around the boat, first without going over the deck and then with going over the deck.

We looked at shooting, blocking and tackling.  Shooting we all faced the goal with 1 keeper and took turns to shoot.  Follow through with hand, aim at a square in the net (not the keeper’s paddle). We tried to shoot in sequence each corner and the centre of the net.  We did shooting when receiving the ball from the feeder who was sitting at the side.  For blocking we did passes to the side of players who then blocked it with their paddle, as with catching try to slow the ball down so it drops by your side.  We also did this with a piggy-in-the-middle style game passing around the middle player who would try to block. We didn’t have time to look at much tackling but there are various ways to keep the opposition off you.

We had a go at making our own training sessions and trying it out.

And we had some slides to show us the basics of the rules and the structure of polo.

There was a lot in this but also a lot missed out.  I would have appreciated some training in how to do a flat-3 formation which we don’t often get to do on our narrow pitch on the canal.

A great day’s learning, I recommend it to anyone.