My sea survival course was in November. At that time we had snow in Montreal but the average day temperatures on the west side of the country were around 10 deg Celsius. It did rain a lot though and if you consider that the ocean temperature was about 4 deg Celsius the training in the water was quite something.
You learn few different things on this course. The first one is how to free yourself from a parachute that's dragging you in the water. This was simulated by a boat pulling us in the ocean, while wearing the actual parachute harness. Although the harness is designed for an easy release it was quite a challange when being submereged in cold salty water. The longer you take to release yourself the more tired you get and the more difficult it becomes, especially once you start swallowing the water. On the second day the sea was too rough to go out and we did the same training in an idoor pool. This was a joke compared to the first day. We dragged each other in the pool water which of course was much slower, not to mention that it was warm too.
On the third and fourth day we trained in the 10 men rafts. They basically told us what we need to do and left us in the middle of the ocean. We could still see the boat but they were far away. We would spend few hours alone in these rafts. Everyone had a task, one would filter the sea water for drinking, another would keep drying the raft of the rain water. Others would paddle. For this part we were using dry suits, meaning that the water doesn't come in contact with your skin. So underneath you can put a lot of layers to keep warm. Even though I had 4 layers my body was freezing, and on top of that some of the suits were leaking too.
Here are some photos taken on this course. Here we are getting instructions before heading out on the boat.
Heading out to the sea.
One very interesting excercise was a man-made raft. This is a technique used when you don't have a raft or a boat. Basically we connected our bodies in water so that one person could lay on top of us. The idea is that we rotate every 10 minutes to keep one person out of the water and thus keep them warmer. This in theory would increase our chance of survival.
Rinsing the salty water.
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