BE FITNESS │ SPORTS
BY ZOE DUNFORD Photo Credit: Anglia Afloat Anyone fancy eating a fish eyeball?
Well you might if you’ve been drifting at sea for days with nothing to drink. Fish eyes are a good source of water apparently. But the advice is leave the rest of the fish uneaten unless you have enough eyeballs’ worth of water to help your body digest the protein.
The longest anyone has survived at sea on a life raft is 133 days. He was Poon Lim who drifted for 133 days in the South Atlantic during World War II. The longest by far anyone has survived drifting on cold water is 119 days. This was in the 1980s when a trimaran capsized off New Zealand.
I put myself through a course in Lowestoft designed to enhance mine and the other delegates’ chances of being one of the lucky few. Along the way we learn about immersion foot, secondary drowning and how to collect water (there are other things to try before you get desperate enough for eyeballs).
My fellow delegates are a mixture of staff from the UK’s largest marine science centre, Cefas, and engineers working for wind farm companies and oil and gas rigs. The college has also trained Atlantic rowers, members of the US Air Force and RAF Search and Rescue crew.
The first advice we’re given is to avoid getting in the water if at all possible. “Your boat is your best lifeboat,” says course tutor Malcolm Horton again and again. “Only abandon ship when there is no alternative and on the order of the captain.” We dress in swimming costumes, boiler suits and deck shoes for the practical. Malcolm turns up in a wetsuit. We pull on our Perry lifejackets – the standard kind that are basically rigid foam with a hole for the head.
The best way to board a life raft is directly from the mother ship so you stay dry. If you can’t be lowered onto it or climb into it from a ladder, you can jump through the entrance of an inflatable one. “Try not to jump on the protective canopy or you might puncture it,” warns Malcolm. If you’re over two and half metres above the raft, your fall might damage it. This is when there may be no alternative but to jump in the water and climb aboard. And this is what we are about to practice.
The platform at the college is three and a half metres high and, Malcolm enthuses, “looks twice that because you can see the same distance again under water.” There is usually a delegate who does not want to jump but Malcolm manages to coax most through it. One by one we are ushered to the edge. Holding the lifejacket away from the face with one hand, and covering our mouths and noses with the other to stop water pouring in, we step into thin air. SPLASH!
Jumping from much higher, we would have to throw our lifejackets over, then jump after them, as otherwise they can break your neck on impact. If this was cold water the gasp reflex would kick in and we’d be in danger of inhaling salt water. So when we surface we keep our airways covered. Malcolm tells us a teaspoonful of saltwater is enough to drown you up to three days after it enters the lungs. This rare event is called secondary drowning. The first sign is coughing up frothy phlegm. Even with medical attention, chances of survival are slim.
The next priority after avoiding drowning is keeping warm. We practice the H.E.L.P position (Heat Escape Lessening). Hands in lifejackets and knees up. Then we huddle like penguins. Two people hug face-to-face with arms around each others’ waists. Two more people hug their sides, then the remaining four huddle round the edge. With more people you could keep going.
In water you lose body heat 25 times faster than in air. Our summer seas climb to only 15 C. We would survive two or three hours in water this temperature. In winter they are often below five degrees, which you would survive for only two or three minutes. Your hands and feet feel it first. Then your limbs. A feeling of apathy follows before you lose consciousness. If you are hypothermic your body shuts down, and although your pulse may be too weak to be detected and your breath too weak to hear, it may still be there.
“Never give up on a hypothermic person until they have been thoroughly re-warmed,” says Malcolm. “Though don’t warm them up too quickly or they’ll lose blood pressure and collapse.”
A 40°C bath is perfect. A bath has the added benefit of keeping you horizontal so the blood doesn’t drain away from your organs to your legs. Malcolm puts on the rain sprayers, the wind machine and the wave machine to make our experience more realistic. The college is kitted to create force six winds and waves over a metre high. It’s exhilarating and we are grateful it’s not cold.
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104