Safety Training Weekend - Yerba Buena Island

Thank you to the Coast Guard - San Francisco Station for their generosity, courtesy, and professional presentations. We learned many useful, and perhaps life saving, techniques. We appreciate the use of the facilities; we felt most welcome.

On October 15-17, 1999, many units from Area III met met at Yerba Buena Island for an annual training weekend. Scouts learned techniques for emergency drills involving damage control, pipe patching, signaling, man overboard, and dewatering. Meanwhile, the adults attended Adult Leader Training and a cruising seminar. Saturday evening found the Scouts at the traditional dance or movie. Sunday before cruising home, the Compass Rose and a Coast Guard helicopter demonstrated the procedure for rescuing a person in the water and placing him safely aboard a ship. The procedure impressed us all.
The Orion docked safely at the 1998 Safety Training Weekend at YBI.

Carl Shelhorn, Skipper - SSS Chaser, organized the weekend.

Josh Gilliland, Mate - Griffin, was in charge of making sure that everything Carl arranged ran smoothly.

One of the favorite events is Pipe Patching. The idea is to patch all the holes in leaking pipes. The real purpose as far as the Scouts are concerned, is to get the entire crew as wet as possible. The SSS Orion crew was paired with the SSS Siren Song crew for the weekend.

The Tradewind crew learn the proper attire for man-overboard drill in frigid water. Such charming outfits!

This is the boat the Coast Guard uses for damage control training. The boat was constructed with holes in it ON PURPOSE! Again the Scouts learned about keeping water out of unwanted areas, but the result was a soaked, happy, and hungry crew. The Coast Guard fed us an excellent dinner and sent us home Sunday morning. The weekend was wondereful, but we realized that we hope to never have to use the information we collected.

THANKS AGAIN TO THE COAST GUARD!

"GUMBY SUITS" – a "must have" this season.

Survival Training – the stylish attire for living in the frigid waters of San Francisco Bay. The garments modeled here, more commonly known as "lobster suits", are size Adult-Large and most of our scouts are size Teen-average.

Vessel Traffic Safety controls all boats from Sacramento and Stockton to Redwood City and outside the Golden Gate. Their equipment is state-of-the-art; you can even see the windows of Alcatraz with VTS cameras. The first thing you learn there is "Don’t touch ANYTHING!" – Doug? – DOUG!!!

We practiced patching holes in boats again, in hopes that this is extraneous information.

And fought frightful, fierce, fires fearlessly

Nate is pretending to have splashed heaven-only-knows-what chemical in his eyes and needs to use one of the first-aid techniques available.

The weekend before YBI we helped the Chaser crew prepare equipment for Safety Training Weekend. We dried and packed the Gumby suits. We also sorted and packed the pyrotechnics (flares); in the process we learned how many ways these valuable safety aids can deteriorate and break so they are unusable. So, what DO you do with unusable flares?

However, setting off the good flares under Coast Guard supervision and instruction was great fun!

"You want me to do WHAT?" This is Michael’s reaction to one of several seemingly odd requests:

Serving meals on the hood of Mrs. Sterling’s car

Patching leaking pipes with "whatever"

Getting into a Gumby suit

Getting out of a Gumby suit

Patching several holes in a boat

Staying up for the entire dance just so we can clean up

Sleeping on Bob’s Big Black Boat – better known as the Reliance

 

After all the instruction, there’s time to linger and socialize.

Do these Scouts look ready to PARTY?

Back to Main Page