|
USE YOUR BROWSER BACK BUTTON TO RETURN TO THE PREVIOUS PAGE
Crew Safety
Orientation
 My niece, four of her friends and my brother are coming
down this week on the boat for their spring break. I’ll anchor off Key West and
they’ll dinghy in & out, and maybe go out for a day or two of snorkeling. Many
of us have friends and family that come down and enjoy the water and boating
with us. Each time I get a new crew on the boat we have a sit down safety
orientation before we do anything else – both for safety and to keep your boat
from being inadvertently abused or broken. In a nutshell here’s a summary of
your pre-boating briefing: Crew should have familiarity with all onboard safety
equipment & critical systems before leaving dock - keeping in mind what they
need to know if the skipper bites the dust. Go over the locations of
pfd’s and fire extinguishers
with crew. Crew on cruising boats should have familiarity with the plumbing and
electrical systems (i.e. don’t drain the batteries or water unnecessarily).
Review with crew about docking & undocking to prevent injury, - since the
skipper is so busy then, this would be a terrible time for an inexperienced
crewmember to go overboard or caught between a piling and the boat rubrails.
With nonboating crew go over boat basics like one hand for the boat & one for
yourself, how to go up & down ladders (backwards not forwards), where they can
roam on the boat while underway, how NOT to stop up the heads, etc.. Clarifying
small child supervision is a biggie. Your smoking policy onboard is good to go
over too. We let anyone smoke up on deck (safely) but request no smoking below
decks (wooden boat you know). The VHF Radio is a major SAFETY DEVICE. Go over
VHF OPERATION with all crew. Show basic operation 1.
On/Off 2. Squelch 3. Channel Selection. Show how a normal call is made by
repeating 3 times on Ch16 then switch to working channel. Review some of the
channel uses - basic ones. Go over MayDay call procedures & point out that it’s
ONLY for life threatening situations. We post one of those “cheat sheet”
stickers on the helm to guide our nonboating crew in emergency radio usage.
Discuss the *CG on cellular phones. They should know how to read the
GPS position to give over the radio in an emergency. Go to
our website to see what I tell them about sharks (boat jokes pages –
“Shark Attack!”).
P/C Gregory Absten
|
