Monthly Archives: April 2019

RESEARCH

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SEAMANSHIP SKILLS

THE THREE R’S
Ah, yes that well worn and abuse word 'risk'. Lots of measures have be slung at risk. Risk assessment, risk aversion, risk management, risk mitigation, risk levels. Life is risk the moment we are born, we have not make friends with the chaos to understand how to work with it.

Rescue Water Craft operations are high risk. Very high risk. The greatest risk is the mindset of those at the helm. What they do know and what they do not know. Let's step back for a moment and reflect on research concepts that can help us make peace with the devil we boat with.

Take a break here on these three R's:

1. Research
2. Reflect
3. Review

WE ARE BOATERS NOT LIFESAVERS

None of us can solve these unless you choose to go backwards and become weaker. We work in an unsafe environment, sometimes we have to retreat to move forward. Take apart our programs and restructure them or add to them. What we did last year will not work this year, everything is changing.

When you train you need a mentor, but ideally you need to be your own mentor. This will make your responsible and that is the social contract we need to endorse for our seamanship skills.

A subject matter expert aka an instructor will not solve the problem for you, they will allow you to discover the problem and deal with the realm of selection.

MENTORSHIP

This means your instructor(s) or mentor(s) have provided you with the terms and conditions of risk potential and the scheme of natures complexity.

They show you your delivery process and they focus on the ending. They allow you to learn and do not hold your capability hostage.
They must know the answers to the questions. They cannot guess and neither can you. You both need answers that lead to the functionality of high risk safety in a high risk environment so you don't become a statistic.

Question your training. Does it feel right? Does it line up with safety? Does it look unsafe? If it does, speak up and ask for an answer. Challenge the safety in training at all times. This is important for you and the instructors.

Protective training programs are destructive, they must be functional and modern. Otherwise you lose the knowledge potential which is replaced by a safe place nature will not respect and that creates and endorses a regressive program that will cause harm.

If your program is not able to confront danger and risk, shut it down. Start over. This is a great solution for a problem that can take people down a wormhole of wrong.

Confront your program and your program and personnel can grow. That is how we learn!

______________________
Posted: April 15, 2019

Content Creator of Rescue Water Craft and Personal Water Craft boating international education standards: Shawn Alladio is the world’s foremost authority and leading subject matter expert. She cares most about her community and the culture surrounding the safety of event service providers and Rescue Water Craft operators, working hard and dedicated towards protecting their reputation, distributing safety information and continuing to train these amazing individuals to the highest standards of care.

__________

Have any questions? Join the Rescue Water Craft Association
and discover what your community is doing to modernize standards, safety and reduce liability!
Join the Rescue Water Craft Association

Content Creator: Shawn Alladio cares most about her community and the culture surrounding the safety of event service providers and Rescue Water Craft operators, working hard and dedicated towards protecting their reputation, distributing safety information and continuing to train these amazing individuals to the highest standards of care.

Use at your own risk. Please take a qualified Rescue Water Craft training course and maintain proper records and respect all the PWC, RWC, PPE, and gear OEM manufacturer warning labels and cautions.

COURAGE

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SEAMANSHIP SKILLS

Being a mariner is a thousands year old calling of boat wrecks, capsizing and drownings in our wake.

Seek a mentor or qualified boating safety instructor who realizes ‘that what is fatally flawed in training that they have already discovered’, they can help their students with the limit, until they reach the limit of their instructor.

Safety is a behavior, it is not a word or a phrase. It is an ACTION!

WE ARE BOATERS NOT LIFESAVERS

And hopefully both instructors and Coxswains have the courage to go beyond and continue to modernize the rescue mindset for Rescue Water Craft operations.

Do not be held hostage by a training manual.

Seek the creators of the discipline who are living it, as it if were their life.

We adapt through our training methods and demands because it is not complicated to comprehend the reasons why. Its the probability of patrol, response, search and recovery. It's also a part of that necessary maintenance territory we must endorse 85% of the time. 15% of your operations may be in the field on the water, the rest is program maintenance and recurring training.

We can scale our adaptation to the order of safety.

MARITIME SECURITY

Collectively through mutable experience levels and personnel discussions, we can scale our adaptation to the order of safety.

we can scale this up to the order of how the ocean moves, how the river flows, how the weather bears down in the negative.

How do you know the full extent of your capability?

You train, by repetitive exposure to methods in these elements that bring out your flaws and in isolated actions and exact pieces of evaluation and assessment brings you to a competency level once you reach your training limit.

Keep training, but make sure its effective and you know your equipment and the water. Do not become a potential victim.

Be courageous or open the door to become a statistic.

______________________
Posted: April 15, 2019

Content Creator of Rescue Water Craft and Personal Water Craft boating international education standards: Shawn Alladio is the world’s foremost authority and leading subject matter expert. She cares most about her community and the culture surrounding the safety of event service providers and Rescue Water Craft operators, working hard and dedicated towards protecting their reputation, distributing safety information and continuing to train these amazing individuals to the highest standards of care.

__________

Have any questions? Join the Rescue Water Craft Association
and discover what your community is doing to modernize standards, safety and reduce liability!
Join the Rescue Water Craft Association

Content Creator: Shawn Alladio cares most about her community and the culture surrounding the safety of event service providers and Rescue Water Craft operators, working hard and dedicated towards protecting their reputation, distributing safety information and continuing to train these amazing individuals to the highest standards of care.

Use at your own risk. Please take a qualified Rescue Water Craft training course and maintain proper records and respect all the PWC, RWC, PPE, and gear OEM manufacturer warning labels and cautions.

SACRIFICE

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INFLUENTIAL

Some Rescue Water Craft instructors are privileged due to their own self conceived status and these positions may not be favored by the team who knows they don’t have the right to question the hierarchy.

What makes instructors mature is the necessity of the goal, not protecting a kingdom of wrong.

Service as an instructor is a responsibility in saving lives, its a significant burden to bear.

WE ARE BOATERS NOT LIFESAVERS

We are a power boating community, we are to protect, I say protect and defend ‘Seamanship Skills’.

We do not see hardly any Rescue Water Craft instructors worldwide who get this, they may have lifesaving or fire training, but this does not make them a mariner nor a boating safety instructor.

In fact, this may actually make them dangerous.

Training in the maritime community is not lifesaving. Its boating education. Lifesaving is only one function of boat operations.

This is where the fire service and lifesaving services fail our maritime community. They do not separate the two and therefore they undercut the need for seamanship skills. They are essentially killing our maritime community with this mindset.

Social media and news outlet videos do not lie.

In fact, we cringe when we see the potential of risk they endorse without comprehending its negligent or has great potential to cause harm both to their reputation and survivors.

BOATING SAFETY CULTURE

Law Enforcement and the military get it, why? Because they have Marine Units!

They are vested in our boating culture and community and boating law is scripted around the personification of their use for public service and protection.

Most of our trauma comes from fire and lifeguard services and its sadly expanding. If you are in the lifesaving or fire rescue community we implore you to join our boating community and learn about our seamanship skills.
Make them yours, but do not ignore this warning. Heed this advice now, today, this minute.

This is not about pride or ego, it is about service and competency. If I had a tooth that needed work done on it i would not go to an automotive technician, I would go to a dentist.

Lifesaving is not Rescue Water Craft Operations. It is only one facet of multi-use competencies required of a competent and qualified Rescue Water Craft Coxswain.

______________________
Posted: April 15, 2019

Content Creator of Rescue Water Craft and Personal Water Craft boating international education standards: Shawn Alladio is the world’s foremost authority and leading subject matter expert. She cares most about her community and the culture surrounding the safety of event service providers and Rescue Water Craft operators, working hard and dedicated towards protecting their reputation, distributing safety information and continuing to train these amazing individuals to the highest standards of care.

__________

Have any questions? Join the Rescue Water Craft Association
and discover what your community is doing to modernize standards, safety and reduce liability!
Join the Rescue Water Craft Association

Content Creator: Shawn Alladio cares most about her community and the culture surrounding the safety of event service providers and Rescue Water Craft operators, working hard and dedicated towards protecting their reputation, distributing safety information and continuing to train these amazing individuals to the highest standards of care.

Use at your own risk. Please take a qualified Rescue Water Craft training course and maintain proper records and respect all the PWC, RWC, PPE, and gear OEM manufacturer warning labels and cautions.

VISION IS INTENT

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SOLUTION

When a program is failing it's time to sit down and review. Is there any corruption in the program design?

Admissions and training that is effective, reliable and purposeful is what the public deserves. The operational ideal needs to be destroyed in programs that are vetted on it, and not on reality.

There is plenty of negative evidence with departments and personnel names attached to the videos and photos to fill our 'what not to do' archives. These are not going to come off the internet and can be used against them in a court of law. They are essentially uploading the evidence against them.

Let’s focus on the positives and lend these Coxswains the proper audience as guardians against reckless and negligent predatory range.

EVIDENCE BASED

The evidence for that is the natural order of nature and its negative patterns of the following:

1. Weather
2. Floods
3. Disasters of various magnitudes
4. Human ignorance of adventure without preparation.

When exposed to something new in the training field we have drama as we call it, but it’s the complexity of danger and its friends. We must face this reality based monolith with courage and knowledge.

By incorporating effective training (emphasize effective) we learn how to adapt at every level of risk. This is a scale we drive and aim high for.

We train to be bigger than the chaos we are surrounded by.

Effective training is to assist and guide those to be exposed in a safe and leveled realm of the extent of our human capability in the risk we will respond to.

Its a complimentary need and oftentimes we are quite restricted.

SAFE

Safety is a determinable scale.

Risk and chaos that is determined in the different types of call outs and environments can be overwhelming. Especially if the training is not set to meet the response. Personnel are held back to their last level of attainable skills or poor instruction.
Make sure you are aiming high and remain unreasonable to some degree. Why? Nature is not concerned with your program, but you better be concerned about the power of nature itself. It's in control 100% of the time and we need to learn to work with it, not beneath its scope.

Sometimes we just don't go, or we close a program, or we upgrade our capability.

______________________
Posted: April 15, 2019

Content Creator of Rescue Water Craft and Personal Water Craft boating international education standards: Shawn Alladio is the world’s foremost authority and leading subject matter expert. She cares most about her community and the culture surrounding the safety of event service providers and Rescue Water Craft operators, working hard and dedicated towards protecting their reputation, distributing safety information and continuing to train these amazing individuals to the highest standards of care.

__________

Have any questions? Join the Rescue Water Craft Association
and discover what your community is doing to modernize standards, safety and reduce liability!
Join the Rescue Water Craft Association

Content Creator: Shawn Alladio cares most about her community and the culture surrounding the safety of event service providers and Rescue Water Craft operators, working hard and dedicated towards protecting their reputation, distributing safety information and continuing to train these amazing individuals to the highest standards of care.

Use at your own risk. Please take a qualified Rescue Water Craft training course and maintain proper records and respect all the PWC, RWC, PPE, and gear OEM manufacturer warning labels and cautions.

ZERO HERO

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ZERO

There is no reason to learn from mishap lessons, but there is every reason to prevent them from occurring in the first place!

When mishap admission is confronted, terrible mishaps will stop.

Every Coxswain is responsible for everything that happens to themselves, their team and their operations. Every Coxswain is responsible for the recovery and transport of survivors.

This does not mean getting lucky or dismissing reckless operations underway.

DISHONORABLE MENTION

These operators allow the repeat of potential tragedy because they are willing to hold themselves in risk behaviors that are reckless, dangerous and negligent.

These operators will fight like mad to protect their mishaps and flaws and promote dangerous practices with a passion that would be better reserved for some humble admissions of wrong.

They are not a Hero, they are an Adversary. This makes them destructive.

THE CURE

Make sure first your program is not the problem. Assess your program functionality by having an accredited boating safety instructor with current credentials assess the program. After that its time to tackle personnel issues.

1. Remove them from operations.

2. Roll back to training and remedial action.

3. Document with accuracy the inconsistencies in operations.

4. Counsel with appropriate operational behaviors.

5. Enforce them.

Safety is a way of being. It is not a certificate. It is what that individual does with the knowledge that makes or breaks operations. Stay steady, stay true and remember that risk is not a word, its our friend challenging us to be responsible.

______________________
Posted: April 15, 2019

Content Creator of Rescue Water Craft and Personal Water Craft boating international education standards: Shawn Alladio is the world’s foremost authority and leading subject matter expert. She cares most about her community and the culture surrounding the safety of event service providers and Rescue Water Craft operators, working hard and dedicated towards protecting their reputation, distributing safety information and continuing to train these amazing individuals to the highest standards of care.

__________

Have any questions? Join the Rescue Water Craft Association
and discover what your community is doing to modernize standards, safety and reduce liability!
Join the Rescue Water Craft Association

Content Creator: Shawn Alladio cares most about her community and the culture surrounding the safety of event service providers and Rescue Water Craft operators, working hard and dedicated towards protecting their reputation, distributing safety information and continuing to train these amazing individuals to the highest standards of care.

Use at your own risk. Please take a qualified Rescue Water Craft training course and maintain proper records and respect all the PWC, RWC, PPE, and gear OEM manufacturer warning labels and cautions.

CHAOS BY VOLITION

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CHAOS

The majority of Rescue Water Craft (RWC) operators are not RWC Coxswains. There are far too many whom are unsafe operators who believe they are doing the job appropriately, however their practices are negligent, it’s easy to identify.

Here are a few examples:

1. Hulls are not in the water (hulls leaving surface contact)
2. Operators are constantly jumping waves and wakes
3. Operators lack seamanship skills resulting in unstable craft
4. Operators use improper riding position and unsafe boating practices.

These operators oftentimes have the words 'RESCUE' on the side of their craft, but their actions are far from representing a water rescue mindset, more like a recreational riding PWC racing mindset.

They fail to understand what 'safe speed' underway means. It's starting to get a little bit better but not much as too many use unsafe practices from learning on video replay and ineffective training models. The good news, they can only get better! But they have to admit where their operations can cause harm first. Are they able to do this? We sure hope so!

HONORABLE MENTION

how can we help them? Being vocal about their potential for mishaps. Pointing out their errors and leading justifications of why. They may not like this, but they need to hear it before they damage their reputation or cause injury.

What else is going on? They do not understand how to maintain the boats from a maritime safety at sea mindset and have no supporting data to justify inspections.

To mediate between the two is the discovery that there is a safe place in training, and a dangerous place residing in the individual ego. Both are at war with one another as a dynamic catastrophe of limitation.

Let’s say it loudly.

Ego driven operators are weak, they are paralyzed by their own unknowns by not confronting danger with competency measures.

Through observation of videos online in social media posts, they hold onto their behaviors and the refusal to ask for help or critique.

ADVICE

They hide in the shadows rather than brave the flaws of learning. This is how a program collapses when this arbitrary fate of protecting corrupt behaviors is endorsed as ‘normal’.

When operators strive to protect the wrongs they endorse, they are not welcome in our maritime community. Seamanship skills were built upon the deaths of mariners, crude, hard and harrowing deaths.

Train like your life and others depend upon it, but first understand what that means.

As my mother used to tell me 'get over yourself'. Best advice I was ever given.

______________________
Posted: April 15, 2019

Content Creator of Rescue Water Craft and Personal Water Craft boating international education standards: Shawn Alladio is the world’s foremost authority and leading subject matter expert. She cares most about her community and the culture surrounding the safety of event service providers and Rescue Water Craft operators, working hard and dedicated towards protecting their reputation, distributing safety information and continuing to train these amazing individuals to the highest standards of care.

__________

Have any questions? Join the Rescue Water Craft Association
and discover what your community is doing to modernize standards, safety and reduce liability!
Join the Rescue Water Craft Association

Content Creator: Shawn Alladio cares most about her community and the culture surrounding the safety of event service providers and Rescue Water Craft operators, working hard and dedicated towards protecting their reputation, distributing safety information and continuing to train these amazing individuals to the highest standards of care.

Use at your own risk. Please take a qualified Rescue Water Craft training course and maintain proper records and respect all the PWC, RWC, PPE, and gear OEM manufacturer warning labels and cautions.

RESCUE DRAMA

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WATER RESCUE DRAMA

Every time we train, we are exposed to complexities by the dynamics of nature and our human framework. This is to increase from the insufficiencies of the last complex learning objective.

 Danger
 Risk
 Behavior

SACRIFICE

Or you can sacrifice your reputation, equipment and well being by regressing to not participating in effective training:

 Closed mind
 Restrictive to danger and its remedial necessary corrections
 Endorsing tragedy in service

RESPONSIBLE PEOPLE ARE GREATLY ADMIRED

How can you increase functionality through service and reduce drama?

1. Research your program need, make a list and check the boxes
2. Source multiple outlets
3. Connect with the boating community and disconnect with lifesaving, you are a boater first!
4. Use your RWC Owner’s Manual
5. Secure an appropriate budget that tracks all program demands
6. Train with credited instructors. Ask them for their boating credentials.
7. Evaluate and track your in-service instructors, are they current in knowledgeable of boat operations?
8. Track your mishaps, do not repeat history

These eight items will assist your department Rescue Water Craft Program to get on target and stay on track!

______________________
Posted: April 15, 2019

Content Creator of Rescue Water Craft and Personal Water Craft boating international education standards: Shawn Alladio is the world’s foremost authority and leading subject matter expert. She cares most about her community and the culture surrounding the safety of event service providers and Rescue Water Craft operators, working hard and dedicated towards protecting their reputation, distributing safety information and continuing to train these amazing individuals to the highest standards of care.

__________

Have any questions? Join the Rescue Water Craft Association
and discover what your community is doing to modernize standards, safety and reduce liability!
Join the Rescue Water Craft Association

Content Creator: Shawn Alladio cares most about her community and the culture surrounding the safety of event service providers and Rescue Water Craft operators, working hard and dedicated towards protecting their reputation, distributing safety information and continuing to train these amazing individuals to the highest standards of care.

Use at your own risk. Please take a qualified Rescue Water Craft training course and maintain proper records and respect all the PWC, RWC, PPE, and gear OEM manufacturer warning labels and cautions.