I guess it is Tuesday. I have now had two days of Forest Service training, in company with a lot of other seasonal folks, and it has been intense. Yesterday was ethics, hazardous communications, defensive driving, wilderness, sexual harassment, payroll and housing, and probably some other things I’m forgetting.

Today was a lot more hands on. The topics were fire and water, with a few plants thrown in. We visited the beach and shoreline to familiarize ourselves with some of the plants. Thanks to my mother knowing pretty much everything, I already knew most of what the instructor told us. I already grew up eating fireweed and goose tongue and avoiding pushki on sunny days (or any days, really).

We also watched a video, taken by a tourist, of a halibut charter boat sinking, and noted all the things that they did wrong. They never looked for the hole. They didn’t try to bail although they had at least one five gallon bucket. They didn’t have any backup/battery powered GPS when the electric system went out. They never said “MAYDAY.” They didn’t put on extra clothes before abandoning into a zodiac. They didn’t try to signal the boats that were nearby, but waited to shoot off a flare until a helicopter was spotted (they were able to contact the Coasties on a cell phone before the boat went under).

The instructor’s opinion was that so many people spend so much time watching television, that most automatically put themselves in the spectator role. Someone in this situation spent the whole time videotaping, when they could have picked up a damn bucket and tried to keep the boat from sinking.

Then we went out and spent some time taking action rather than being spectators. We drove out of town to about the end of the road (the paved road goes 7 miles each way from town), and the instructor poured a gallon of gas into a big pan in the middle of a gravel turn out. Then he lit a flare taped to the end of a ten foot pole, and lit the gas, and we took turns putting it out with different types of fire extinguishers. Then we shot off a bunch of flares to see how they worked.

From the flares, I learned that the kind I carried for two summers as a kayak guide in Kachemak Bay are the cheap kind (I knew that) and that once expired they pretty much never work. But a $47 one made in Sweden goes up a thousand feet, makes a big noise, and floats down on a little parachute, and should be visible for forty miles in open country. So if I go kayaking again, now I know that the little orange plastic flares are not the ones I want to take, maybe even if they are new.

Next we went to the pool and experimented with survival suits and with a bunch of different types of life jackets. The instructor, Dug Jensen, lists his business as “Dug Jensen & family” and brought in his wife and son to help. His wife was on the PFD station, and his son was on the side of the pool with a hose to spray cold water in our faces while we tried to do survival things – climb into a floating tent/raft thing, or swim across the pool in a tightly huddled group to conserve heat. A survival suit is a handy thing, but it’s not that comfortable in the long run, and trying to get through the water while it’s cold and coming into your face really sucked. And I’m sure it would be about fifty times worse when you’re out in the open ocean.

Tomorrow afternoon there is another training in the pool, which has been subject of much speculation and we’ll see how bad, or not so bad, it actually turns out. It is called P.I.G. training. The acronym, I believe, stands for Personal Immersion Gadget and to my understanding is some sort of PVC cage with a seat in it, designed to simulate what you would be strapped into in a small plane or helicopter. And the training is how to get out of it in the water. Today with the PFDs, we were told that the aviation life vests are designed so you have to manually trigger inflation, because otherwise they can fatally impair your movement if underwater in a plane.

Myself, I am a pretty strong swimmer, and I have already gone through the nervousness of getting out of kayaks underwater. Plus, it’s a safety training, so it seems pretty obvious that it will be conducted in the safest way possible. But I can still see why some people are pretty nervous about this one. We’ll see how it goes…