2.6 Survival Swimming, Staying Afloat & In-Water Skills

2.6 Survival Swimming, Staying Afloat & In-Water Skills

Core Principle: Column 3 of Table A-VI/1-1 lists eleven practical demonstrations. Four of them are pure in-water skills — swim while wearing a lifejacket, keep afloat without a lifejacket, board a survival craft from the ship and from the water, and safely jump from a height. This section is the theory behind the pool assessment.

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1. The Golden Rule Comes First: Do Not Swim

Section 2.2 established the physics: still water trapped in your clothing warms to near body temperature and insulates you; swimming flushes it away and increases heat loss by 30–50%. So the first in-water decision is not how to swim but whether to swim at all.

              SHOULD I SWIM?  -- the decision tree

   Is there a survival craft, boat, ladder or shore that I can
   realistically reach within about 5-10 minutes of easy effort?
                     |                         |
                    YES                        NO
                     |                         |
         Swim to it, steadily,        Adopt HELP (alone) or HUDDLE
         on your back, feet first.    (in a group). Do not move.

In cold water, the ten-minute window of useful movement from the 1-10-1 rule sets the outer limit. Strong swimmers have drowned trying to cover 200 metres in 8°C water; the failure is neuromuscular, not motivational.

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2. Swimming While Wearing a Lifejacket

A SOLAS lifejacket is designed to hold an unconscious person face-up. That same collar makes ordinary swimming impossible.

1. Lie back into the jacket. Let it support your head. Do not fight it upright.
2. Swim feet first on your back, using a slow, short back-stroke with the arms close to the body, or sculling with the hands beside the hips.
3. Kick gently from the hip, not the knee. Wide kicking pumps cold water through the legs of your clothing.
4. Keep the movement slow and rhythmic. A survivor who thrashes will be exhausted in three minutes and hypothermic sooner.
5. Look where you are going by lifting the chin, not by rolling onto the front.

Exam Trap: Any option describing a front crawl, breaststroke or "swimming head-first toward the raft" in a SOLAS lifejacket is wrong. The buoyancy collar pushes the head back and the freeboard forces the face upward; attempting to swim prone drives water over the face and wastes enormous energy.

Group Movement — The Chain

If a group must move to a raft, link into a chain: each person grips the lifejacket of the person ahead, and the strongest swimmer leads. Nobody is left behind, the group stays a single radar and visual target, and casualties are towed rather than abandoned.

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3. Keeping Afloat Without a Lifejacket

The assessment requires you to stay afloat without flotation. There are three usable techniques, and choosing between them is a water-temperature decision.

Improvised Flotation: The Trouser Float

A classic and genuinely effective technique that is taught in every survival course:

1. Remove your trousers in the water and knot each leg tightly at the ankle.
2. Do up the fly and hold the waistband open with both hands.
3. Sweep the open waistband forward and down onto the water surface, trapping a large bubble of air in the legs — or lift them overhead and bring them down sharply behind your head.
4. Hold the waistband closed under water and put your head between the inflated legs.
5. Re-charge the air every few minutes by splashing water onto the fabric to keep it airtight and re-sweeping.

Other improvised floats: a sealed plastic fender, an empty jerrican with the cap on, a wooden pallet or grating, a sealed cool box, or any inherently buoyant debris. Do not rely on an inflatable air mattress or beach toy — they are not designed for seaway conditions and puncture readily.

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4. Boarding a Survival Craft from the Water

Getting out of the water is the highest-value action available to a survivor.

1. Approach the raft from downwind so the wind pushes you onto it rather than away.
2. Take hold of the boarding ramp or ladder, not the canopy fabric.
3. Kick your legs horizontally up to the surface so your body is planing, not hanging vertically. A vertical body cannot be pulled over a buoyancy tube.
4. Pull your upper body face-down onto the ramp and roll over the lower tube into the craft.
5. Once inside, help the next person by grasping under the armpits and pulling as they kick.
6. If a casualty is unconscious, use the lifting becket on their lifejacket or immersion suit — never drag them by an arm alone.

Remember the cold-incapacitation clock: after roughly 10 minutes in cold water, a survivor's hands will not grip a ladder rung. People inside the raft must be prepared to haul.

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5. Surfacing Under Burning Oil

This is a genuine but genuinely last-resort technique. If burning fuel covers the surface between you and safety:

• Swim upwind and underwater — the flames and the toxic products drift downwind.
• Discard the lifejacket only if it prevents you from submerging at all, and only if there is no alternative. Losing buoyancy in cold water is itself lethal, so most guidance is to keep it and swim through the clear water outside the slick if any route exists.
• On surfacing, sweep both arms in a wide circular motion just below the surface to push the burning film away, creating a clear pocket.
• Break the surface with the back of the head first, face downwind, take a breath, and submerge again.
• Repeat. Never surface face-up into flame, and never swim on the surface through fire.

Prefer the alternative every time: go around the slick, not through it. Jump from the windward side of the ship in the first place, and swim to windward as soon as you surface — that is why Section 2.1 makes the windward rule non-negotiable.