Swiftwater rescue – more fun than a grown-up should have!

On a hot and sunny weekend in May of this year, three WMRT members – Wayne Thackray, Darren Edgar-Burrows (Debs) and myself journeyed up to the Yorkshire dales to throw ourselves in the river…repeatedly as it turned out!

This wasn’t just because it was lovely weather. We were taking part in a swiftwater rescue technician training course laid on by Swaledale MRT, and led by Rich Hey. Based at their base in Catterick, we spent four days immersed in the theory and practical of pulling people out of rivers.

To take a step back, this idea began to gain some momentum back in March, after a fact-finding email from the Peak District Mountain Rescue Organisation asking for details of our team’s water rescue capabilities. At the time WMRT didn’t have much to offer, but the idea that was triggered quickly grew into a plan to develop our own water capabilities.

Our first step was to find out who might be interested, and get them trained up. Accordingly, Wayne, Darren and I joined a course run by Rich Hey of Swaledale MRT. And what fun it was – 11 of us from 4 different mountain rescue teams were based at SMRT’s base for 4 days, and I don’t think any of us stopped grinning for the whole time.

The course itself was a IRIA-approved level 3 swiftwater rescue technician course, which over an intensive four days covered theory and practical sessions including hydrology, risk assessment and pre-planning for water incidents, hazard awareness, strategies for water rescue, incident command systems, defensive and offensive swimming, self-rescue, the hierarchy of water rescue, river crossing techniques, throwline rescue systems including V- and Y-lowers, live bait go-tow rescues, boat work and rope systems for live bait and boat-based rescues. We even squeezed in a night water search and rescue exercise.

The first full day was our introduction to survival skills in the water should we end up in the drink. Our instructor took us to a stretch of grade 2 water at Low Force, and told us to swim down it! Only grade 2 all the paddlers amongst us thought, but once you’re in it, without a boat, it can feel just a bit bigger. So, over the course of the afternoon, we got used to reading the current, protecting our heads and spines going down drops, ferry-gliding across currents and breaking into and out of eddies. Some were more tentative than others were to start with, but by the end of the session all were entering the water with a confident splash!

These skills were built on during the second practical session, where we learnt how to retrieve casualties with a variety of throwline techniques, including the go-tow live bait swim – in other words, diving in attached to a throwline and chasing the casualty down the river. On contact, you grab them, don’t let them dunk you, and get your mates to haul you in to the bank. Not something to be done lightly for real, but great fun to do in training!

Then came the night exercise, where we had the chance to integrate what we had learnt so far in a simulated incident. The brief was that someone was seen going over Richmond Falls in a boat about 40minutes previously. The bystanders had retrieved the boat downstream, but couldn’t find the boater. We split into search teams to cover the banks and the river itself, and soon found the unconscious casualty on some rocks in the falls.

That triggered the second phase of the incident – the rescue. A casualty care team gained access to the rocks and stabilised the casualty, who was then loaded into a stretcher and evacuated by floating the stretcher to the bank for a quick carry up to the team ambulance.

There were lots of learning points from this, but it was very encouraging to see how a group drawn from 4 different teams, who had only been together for 3 days, could mesh together to provide a coherent response to an incident. All this training works! 

The last day of the course saw us playing around with boats – I mean learning to handle rescue craft. The weather was again very kind to us – we hadn’t h ad less than full sunshine any day – so it was no hardship to practice self-rescue, recovering a casualty into the boat, capsize drills and the like. A highlight was the method of scooping up a crew member by ducking under the capsized hull and clinging on to the tube as the boat was righted.  We also got to practise some technical ropework with highlines, Norwegian and English reeves, and four-point tethers, all using the clean line principle so important for safe water rescue rope work.

Many thanks to our hosts, Swaledale MRT, and to our instructor Rich Hey, for providing such good tuition, and making the whole experience such fun. As one of the group said, swiftwater rescue really is more fun than a grown-up should have!