Confirmed dates for Nepal

This autumn the destination for me running IRF courses are India and Nepal. You could also be training in Canada or Spain! 

Great selection of courses! 

Safety talk part 2

3 The unspoken message and the right humour balance     

Your safety talk will actually convey some subliminal messages without you actually knowing. Here are a few that I like to get across without verbally mentioning them.

• ·         Now is a time to sit down & listen to what we say. Take it all on board.
• ·         You are being taken care of by a team of professional guides. We are in charge, your safety is paramount.
• ·         Do exactly what we say and it will cut down the chances of any safety compromises.

The humour balance can be a tricky point to cross.  Too many jokes and laughs and your customers won’t take you seriously. No jokes and smiles and your customers will become uptight and nervous.  Trip leaders who can give a seamless safety talk with lots of humour have years of experience on the river and giving safety talks. New guides should develop their own style of delivery that suits their sense of humour.

4 The wrap up & mantra

Once you have given all of the information to your guests it’s a good idea to ask a few questions to make sure the information has been absorbed. I like to ask the following 3 questions

1. What do you do if you fall out of the raft?

2. What do you do if you cannot swim back to the raft?      

3. What do you do if the raft goes upside-down?

From this I can create a 3 point mantra that gets repeated to all guests before we drop into any big rapids

1 If you fall out of the raft smile, hold your paddle and swim back.

2 If you cannot get back to the boat smile, hold your paddle get on your back with your feet up (ww swim position).

3 If the raft flips smile, hold your paddle and stay with the raft.

The reason we ask the customers to smile is quite simple. If they concentrate on smiling they will not panic. FACT

5 The language & communication thing

Most travelled experienced guides will be able to guide in more than one language. It’s always a good idea to be able to pick up most basic commands in another language. Remember just because your crew don’t speak your language it’s not their fault.

 It’s a lot easier for one person to learn a few basic commands in one language than it is to teach 6 or 7 people all of the commands in a foreign. So if you get a crew who do not speak your language you as the guide should make an attempt to learn a few words in their language. 

A back up plan I have is that I have practiced is delivering a safety talk without talking. The common saying “Actions speak louder than words” really does work, try it.

-Mark

Safety talk part 1

The safety talk let’s get it right!!

Over the years I have had the opportunity to witness some professional motivating raft safety talks and unfortunately some painfully poor safety talks.

I wanted to share some of my thoughts behind a safety brief. This post will hopefully share some of my ideas with and hopefully start a productive discussion.

I want to divide the topic into a few separate areas.

1 The setting & introduction

2 The delivery & content order

3 The unspoken messages finding the humour balance

4 The wrap up & mantra

5 The language& communication thing

1.    The setting and introduction

Let’s imagine you are going onto stage to perform. In order to perform at your best you need everything around you to fall into place and work in harmony to make an effective performance (after all that’s what a safety talk is).

Let’s look at a few things to help get the setting right.

A. Mental setting

You should clear your mind of any distractions for the next 20 minutes. No phones, no outside distractions. Your only focus is making sure your customers receive the best possible safety talk possible to enable them to have the best possible trip.

I constantly use the mantra as a trip leader

“Poor safety talk poor trip” or “outstanding safety talk outstanding trip”

Appearance

Would you be taken seriously at that job interview if you were not dressed properly or using the correct body language? 

Here are few hard fast rules I use.

No sunglasses if possible, eye contact is everything.

Fully kitted and ready for action.

Look, talk, and think professional and the rest will follow.

B Setting (environment)

You need to make yourself the sole focus of the customers for the duration of your safety talk. Take away any distractions. Once your customers are distracted it’s really hard to get them back. Below are a few top tips.

Move them if possible to a quiet secluded place. If this is not possible have them sit or stand with their back to the river.

“A common mistake I see during a safety talk is with the customers looking out onto the river. This makes it really hard to keep their attention especially if there are other companies or a big rapid at the put in point.  Your customers will look at the impending doom and never focus on you or your safety talk.”

Take away any reasons to fidget. Make sure all helmets & pfds are already fully adjusted. All cameras, go pros are to be left alone and banned for the duration of the safety talk.

If possible have the customers with the sun & wind behind them. Buses can be used as wind breaks.

If your customers are standing get the small people to the front along with any customers who might not speak the same language as you so that they can get a clear view of the talk.Do not have any customers behind you or out of your field of vision.

“As a guide it is important to be able to make eye contact with all of your customers during the safety talk. Making eye contact with your customers will make then focus on you more. You will also be able to read your customers feelings by looking at their faces. From this you will be able to work out the confident from the nervous customers.

Introduction

Now that you have the attention of your customers,you start by telling them the most obvious things; your name and the names of your guide team. (If you already have not done it earlier)

What you are going to do and why you are doing it

“Now we are going to spend 15 – 20 minutes today talking about the trip and the trip safety. It’s important you listen to me as you will then know how to paddle and what to do if you fall out of the raft”.

Summary

• ·         Clear you own head and prepare yourself first
• ·         Make sure your customers are in a position where you are their sole focus
• ·         Eye contact is everything
• ·         Tell them what you are doing and why you are doing it

Now the setting is correct it’s time to give them some technical information.

2 The delivery & content order

The delivery style of your talk is highly important. On days when the river is high and you know it’s going to be a seat of the pants trip your delivery style will have a higher sense of urgency compared to the days when you are working during lower water levels.

Remember being a good guide is mainly about people skills; be yourself. Don’t become some type of transfixed military robot reading a script without an understanding of what you are talking about. Inject some emotion into your safety talk.

Relax, talk with a smile and be human, eye contact is everything.  Raise your voice when you need to in order to highlight the important points.

You can always try some role reversal imagine yourself as a customer going on a scary raft trip. How would you like to be spoken to?

I have had many heated discussion with fellow guides on the content order of a safety talk. I have taken on board their views and here is what we came up with.

·         Don’t adjust or take off any of the safety kit we give without our permission.

·         The paddle and T pieces

·         The raft and your seating position

·         Efficient  forwards & backwards paddling techniques

·         What to do if you fall out. The OBE, outer boat experience.  (smile, hold your paddle, swim back)

·         The outside line & getting someone back in 

·         Reaching rescue with paddles

·         Aggressive proactive swimming

·         White water swimming position (look around, be active in your own rescue, don’t just sit there)

·         Throw bags

·         Flips  (physically flip the raft on the land and do a dry land  flip drill)

·         Safety kayakers /safety rafts

The one thing I will be asking my crew to do more than anything is to paddle so it is worth a little extra time working with the crew on their paddling technique and timing.

“I used to work for a company that would deliver a really comprehensive safety talk, but no time would be given on showing the customers how to paddle. Yes, all of our customers were well briefed on what to do if the raft flipped but none of them could paddle.”

Get your customers to paddle well to avoid getting into situations where they will be swimming.

- Mark

WWTC Throwbags

For those of you who know me personally you may be aware of my love for great kit. Especially well thought-out, well designed kit. I will hopefully be writing a few posts about some of my favorite kit. I thought I would start here today with some amazing throwbags from wwtc.info.

Having attended an IRF instructor workshop last season I was introduced to these bags and straight away was very impressed with the way that someone had taken the time to really research a product  and get the design spot on. WWTC have 3 great bags 15m pro rescue, 18m classic & 27m boat bag.

Basically a throwbag is a length of floating rope stored in its own bag. How could anybody get this wrong ?. For me most whitewater companies simply produce a throwbag as an afterthought. Having traveled around quite a bit, thrown a few ropes and repacked plenty of them I can normally find a pitfall with most designs. Gaspar at WWTC  seems to have addressed most of the pitfalls and the end design is a sleek easy to use set of throwbags with some great design points.

Lets address the carry system first. How many times have you gone swimming down a rapid and watched your bag go floating past you? Or struggled to rethread the bag back onto its belt after use? All WWTC bags have their own carry system which is simply a housing system for your bag. Which is easy to get to when needed quickly and just as easy to pack the bag back into after a throw.

I remember watching to great horror a bag flying through the air with a carabiner attached to the end of the bag firmly planting its self into a friends face one day and the result was not pretty. The 18m & 27m bags have a padded carabiner pocket which allow you to permanently keep a carabiner stored in the bag.

The over all design of the bag makes them truly easy to throw and easy to repack. The last thing I need when I am working is a bag that is a pain to repack. The bags when empty hold water really well which means they can be filled with water to aid the 2nd throw. The reflective band around the bag will surely help in any night situations.

An optional pocket can purchased and added to the waist belt that enables you to store flip lines, pulleys or prussics. The thing I love about the pocket is that it stays closed unlike some other bags where the pocket is forever opening and your kit falls out all over the show. The 27m boat bag even comes with its own carry system which will allow you too wear  it around the waist although this will make swimming harder but the beauty of the design means that it can be strapped around a cross tube so no need to worry about coming unpacked or clipped onto somewhere where it could become a hazard.

The most important thing for me a the end of the day is the quality of the rope. Gaspar has personally invested many hours researching the best combination of materials to produce a tough floating rope. Both the 15m & 18m bags have a 8mm rope with a unknotted tensile strength  of 10kn (1000kgs). The 27m boat bag has a 10mm rope with a whopping tensile strength of 17.5kn ( 1750kgs)

As I mentioned earlier these bags are functional and well designed and well made: pretty much a bag for life.

This is not a paid advertisement, but an honest review of good throwbags! 

Mark

First course of the summer

On a not so warm Monday morning in Jerisjarvi quite a few kilometers inside the Arctic Circle. Harriniva Hotels & Safaris hosted the first ever International rafting federation guide training program on Finnish water. Hariniva were the very first rafting company established in Finland so it became fitting that they hosted the course. 

8 enthusiastic potential  guides from all corners of Finland attended the course. Finland has a popular raft racing culture but the commercial guiding scene is still developing. Monday kicked off with the normal introductions and registration. Once changed we spent a while shaping and discussing safety talks, then we took to the chilly waters of lake Jeris to practice some flat water paddling skills and commands.We were paddling on a 100 m stretch of ice free lake as the lake was still 90% frozen. After lunch we had a dry land throw bag introduction session followed by some practice throws on the water. We rounded the day off with swimmer rescues & flip drills. Harriniva had kindly given us the use of there water side sauna to use so that we could warm up after our swimming and flip drills. The perfect place to review the days activities .

 Outi dialing in on her dry land throw bag skills. We also spent some time looking at the various re throwing techniques with the new TRU technique becoming a firm favorite.

 Ari with a text book throw.

 Flatwater flip drills.

 Day 2 started with a small ropework test from the previous nights homework. I also had the opportunity to learn the Finnish names for some of the knots. This became a 2 way learning session which was great. After a hydrology session we took to the water. Our course dates had been planned perfectly as the Muonio river had reach peak springtime flows of around 1000 cumecs. The Muonio river forms the most peaceful boarder in the world between Sweden & Finland. The Muonio river is also Europe's longest free flowing river & an excellent fishing river. 

 The commercial section of river that we were using was an excellent run for our guides. 6km of big volume bouncy class 2-3 rapids. We honed our basic skills on some of the more easier sections of the river before laying siege to the mighty Saarikoski rapid. The locals have a healthy respect for this rapid a huge river wide wave train. The guardian wave was around the 3- 4 meter height with a nice tasty flushy hole behind it.We cautiously ran a few chicken shoots and spent time discussing our lines and back up plans should it turn out in a flip. I wanted the team to be absolutely relaxed and happy swimming in big water before we tackled Saarikoski so we moved downstream to practice our swimming skills. Saarikoski mainline would have to wait until day 3.  

 Me leading the way on a practice swim. The weather was improving to around 20c with amazing sunshine.

 Day 3 started with the excitement of tackling the Saarikoski main line. The team had scouted the rapid on numerous occasions and were primed and ready to. Having the opportunity to sit back and watch the team make their own decisions and come up with a safety plan was very rewarding to watch. Big smiles and cheers we had when we successfully ran Saarikoski. Throughout day 3 we managed another 6 clean lines.

   

 Day 4 was dedicated to whitewater rescue skills. The morning session we practiced our dry land wrap drills and learned some basic mechanical advantage systems. After lunch we moved onto a small tributary of the Muonio river. The tributary flowed straight through the center of the Muonio town so the local public had an afternoons entertainment on their doorstep. We practiced 2&4 point raft tethers along with live bait rescues along with shallow water crossings . We finished the day off  with setting up a tensioned diagonal. During the evening we also had the chance to follow and observe a full commercial trip. I ended up guiding one raft. Little known to me my raft was full of celebrities including Ms Finland 2013, a very close line was had in the Saarikoski rapid for the benefit of the tv cameras.  

Day 5 Was a chance to tidy up some loose ends and give the group the chance to practice anything they had not gotten to grips with. For some reason they all wanted to run a flip scenario in a big rapid. Saarikoski was chosen and executed in a swift manner.Our final afternoon consisted of admin followed by a well earned BBQ and a few beers. So many thanks to Harriniva and most of all Bjorn, Henri, Hessu, Outi, Marko, Ari, Jere, Joonas, Kalle for a highly enjoyable week. 

Mark