Month: March 2016

Here’s some lesson plans, or at least coaching points, for the bits needed for a BCU FSRT course.

Intro:

• Assessing risks
• How to get help
• What kit to have to hand
• Ask/give option to warn about medical issues
• Group management, communication and boundaries
• clean rope principle, one handed knife
• safety features of boats
• safety features of clothes and kit
• manual handling issues

Protocols

• Shout, Reach, Throw, Row
• Self, Team, Victim/Swimmer, Equipment
• Communication, Line of Sight, Avoidance/Awareness, Position of max usefulness

Coach a Swimmer to Shore

• eye contact, use name, clear instructions, be firm
• consider hand signal to group to tell them to keep still
• good foot grip or kneel down
• use this for all the other rescues

Paddle rescue

• leg stance
• firm grip

Throwline

• accurate throw to person over 10m or more
• swimmer on their back
• thumbs up for hand grip
• can be under arm, over arm or lob around. under arm usually best, hand on scruff of bag with two fingers on the bag
• finish throw with hand pointing where you want it to go

Throwline Rethrow

• Get it right first time, rethrows will always be rubbish
• large coils in hand and throw all
• large coils onto ground, get water in bag for weight, throw bag
• large coils on ground, small coils in hand, wrap bag round small coils, throw bag

The above can all be done on the land

Contact tows

• front or back

Sling towlines

• watch out for putting over head or in teeth(!)

Towlines

• quick to deploy, quick to release, quick to re-set
• know where the release is and what angle to pull it at

Boat Empties

• like for like craft
• boat empties can be done separate from swimmer stuff to keep people out of cold water for longer
• for GP kayak orientate front to front using footrest bolts
• palm roll upright
• roll on side, one hand at front of cockpit holding it up, one hand on top at back of cockpit pushing down to gently empty
• when all water out use knee to ratchet over your boat and sea-saw to empty
• if the boat still has water in it get swimmer to help pull over and down
• if can’t get swimmer to help then just leave water in it, don’t strain your back
• you can use a sling to help you rotate and lift the boat
• for sea kayaks/touring boats with gunwales rotate bow of boat onto your boat by rolling it away from you and sliding knee under
• Canadians can do same as touring boats above
• or curl method with boats parallel, using gunwale to lift other boat then throw away from you to get it upright

Deep water rescue

• straight lift into kayak easiest
• heel hook into kayak if not so strong, quite faffy
• climb over your kayak, risky
• sling around cockpit as step up
• in canadians they sit in the boat then step into yours

Swimmer rescue

• ensure they are calm before you approach
• holding on to front or back
• keep head away from front of boat
• get them to kick legs if on back

Unconscious rescue

• go alongside swimmer, drop paddle if you need to
• lean onto near side of their boat, reach over and pull from other side
• hold onto their clothes
• first aid: shout to get them to open eyes, squeeze shoulders or hand, check breathing (if not breathing 5 CPR breaths but not much point in chest compressions)
• get assistant to raft up with them and push both boats to shore
• if you can’t get their boat upright them jump in the water and roll it
• if you can’t roll it then pop their deck and drag them out

Self rescue

• This means an eskimo rescue
• get them to practice rolling down and up on bow of another boat if new
• three bangs, hands outwards
• rescuer at 45 degree approach
• also try paddle presentation

Scenarios

• unconcious person in water rescue into canadian
• rescue and kayak from a canadian
• rescue a canadian from a kayak
• sea kayak paddle float

 

There’s no API to update Bugzilla product versions. This is weird because projects like Plasma release dozens of bits of software at the same time and we need to update the version numbers in Bugzilla so people can correctly report bugs against them. Even if it was only 1 bit of software we released it would still be nice to automate that rather than click through lots of web pages.

For Plasma I’ve written a wee shell script which uses Curl to load the relevant page to update the version. It takes a list of Bugzilla products (which in KDE land don’t have any direct relation to Git archives or tars we release so this has to be maintained manually) and a cookie which you need to extract out of your web browser.

plasma-add-bugzilla-versions

git clone git://anongit.kde.org/releaseme