Safety Gear for Whitewater Rafting

Video Transcript

Let's talk a little bit about throw ropes, and when to use them and how to use them. This is a throw rope that we have here. Accompanying with a throw rope you should always have a whistle, which I have attached to my PFD here, and a knife. Whenever you get the rope out of the bag, you have an entanglement possibility so it's always good to have a knife, so that you're able to protect yourself and anybody else. Uh, whenever you take a rope out of the bag, you're escalating the potential harm to other river users, so you need to understand that. You situate yourself on the side of the river carefully, so that from where you're throwing you're able to take care yourselves, you understand where the other river users are and what's responsible. You take out a certain amount of rope, out of the bag, this gives you a certain amount of time before you have to throw the rope, then you position yourself, you blow the whistle, "ROPE!" get their attention, toss the rope, and then you set yourself off, to be a pendulum to shore. Keeping an eye on the person that you throw the rope to at all times, "ON YOUR BACK, ON YOUR BACK!" Great, thank you Hillary. So you need to make sure that you're careful with all this rope, as you can see, when rope gets wet, it loves to wrap around things and people, so you want to take the rope out of the water as quickly as possible. Once you have the rope out of the bag and out of the water, and your situation is now under control you can stuff the rope back in the bag, put the rope over your shoulder, you hold the mouth of the bag open and then you just randomly shove the rope in there. There are two ways that you can do it, you can just do it one-handed like this, or you can do it with your thumb and pointer finger back and forth, that way too. Understand that with the rope you need to be aware of other river users, you need to be in a position on the river where you can pendulum that person to shore. You need to get their attention before you throw the rope. It's dangerous to have the rope floating around people's head and neck if they don't know its there. You also need to remember to have a whistle so that you can get their attention and a knife, so if they're entangled or you're entangled you're able to disengage from that system immediately without having to fumble or untie anything while you are out there.