To mention some water safety issues we all need to know?

[Northernlurker]

Having read of some awful tragedies over the weekend with open water I thought I would start a thread with a few points and others can add. Because not everybody has had the same exposure to open water risks so what is common sense to one person is utterly unknown to others.

Open water in the UK is cold. Really cold. Even on sunny days. The deeper you go, the colder. This can take even fit and well people by surprise.

Don't jump in to unknown water ever. We are a rocky country populated by messy people. Water hides rocks, logs, metal and all manner of hazards.

Piers and jetty lead out from the shore to deep water so boats can be accessed. Don't regard them as an extension of the shore. The water will be both deep and cold.

Swim parallel to the shore, not out to sea.

No inflatables in the sea ever.

Tides move faster than you can walk, know what your exit route is.

If you can't swim, don't go out of your depth. Don't try and help people in trouble. You help just as much by fetching help or fetching items people in the water can hold on to.

Make sure your teenagers know these principles.

And remember 'float to live'

Those videos are so worrying. I am extremely short sighted and don't wear my glasses when swimming. I wouldn't notice if someone was drowning.

@RampantIvy

Those videos are so worrying. I am extremely short sighted and don't wear my glasses when swimming. I wouldn't notice if someone was drowning.

I think it' s particularly hard with kids because they often bob under the water intentionally, for fun. You can understand why the other swimmers assumed the boy in the video was doing it deliberately whereas, with an adult, you'd be more likely to suspect something was wrong.

@Ihaventgottimeforthis

Those bloody mermaid tails too, will lift up your legs out of the water & dunk your torso. Potentially lethal on children.

Only if they're a) shit cheap ones and b) on a child who can't swim or c) unsupervised. The fins in the cheap ones are also notorious for snapping and cutting feet to ribbons.

The ones I used to use for the parties I ran, and still use for photoshoots and social meets, are not cheap, but are buoyancy neutral (so don't make you float any differently than you would not wearing it), open ended for quick release and I still never put anyone in one if they haven't already proven to me they can swim in specific ways.

I'm a pro and also have a big neoprene tail without the aforementioned safety features, it's heavy, requires decent core strength as well as swimming ability, and is and not for the fainthearted. Some of my fellow professional merfolk have silicone tails which are heavier still.

Mermaid tails are not inherently dangerous but the same rules apply as with any sport - don't buy something and give it to a novice who has no training in it and expect them to be fine.

Haven't even name changed because this assumption that mermaid tails are dangerous makes me sad - they are a wonderful thing, if used correctly and sensibly.

And for god's sake don't take a mermaid tail to the beach for your child to swim in - even experienced mers take time to adjust to swimming with waves, rather than in a pool.

[quote Cloud1220]@Mamanyt crikey, that was a really difficult watch, but so important, thanks for sharing. So scary that there were so many people around him, and so close by![/quote]
Yeah, I thought it was urgent. They LOOK like they are playing when they are dying. NEVER take that chance. If you see a child acting like that in the water, haul them to the surface and ask, "Are you ok?" Better to be embarrassed than witness a death.

It is not just the inflatables that is a problem. I saw the BBC news item about Loch Lomond and there was a couple pedalling away in one of those pedalo crafts. They are dangerous, but few people realise that pedal boats can be dangerous too, if there are no life guards or someone who sells the time on them, because the cold water cramps the leg muscles and they turn into the same dangerous craft as al inflatable. When your legs stop working, you just drift. It becomes a floating boat with no power.

Thanks so much OP! We live on the coast and have two teens who are fearless in the sea and nearby rivers. It is a worry! I've now sent them the Float to Live video.

I would like to just pop this in as we are talking about water incidents, as floods/flash flooding are a current event, this might be useful water knowledge too :-

I think that the fairly recent craze for wild swimming has been responsible for an increase in drownings/water-related incidents.

It's important to make sure that you swim with other people and go to a spot which is popular with other swimmers.

Also, have a look around the river to find entry and exit points. It is easy enough to get in, but harder to get out.

someone mentioned Weil's Disease. Very nasty, caused by rat's urine .

Pike fish. These hungry buggers live at the bottom of rivers/lakes and love nothing more than a nice foot/leg to feast on.

Float to live:

Gravel pits as well or any filled in quarry.

Horrifically dangerous if you can't swim, just a few feet from the shoreline you just drop off a cliff.

Loads in and around the staines area.

Claimed a few lives sadly.

I think that the fairly recent craze for wild swimming has been responsible for an increase in drownings/water-related incidents

It hasn't. The number of deaths by drowning is falling.

@MissLucyEyelesbarrow @Snookie00 - I would like to apologise. You're both right, of course. People should learn the proper terminology and how to avoid & get out of dangers and drum it into their children.

If you've had alcohol, even a small amount, stay away from water. Stay off tow paths, cliff sides, river banks, coastal paths. It doesn't take much to fall in.

I think there was a case last year in Northern Ireland of a woman who drowned whilst open water swimming but it is incredibly rare and as @MissLucyEyelesbarrow says, most drownings are by people who inadvertently fall in or who shouldn’t have been in the water in the first place. The deaths this weekend at Loch Lomond were a drunk teenage tourist jumping off a bridge and a family who couldn’t swim. Our coast and waterways are an amazing resource and millions of people use them every year. We should be encouraging more use of them but with proper precautions.

This is such a great thread. Thank you so much.

@Mamanyt thank you for sharing - I knew that drowning didn’t look like the tv, but those videos are great examples. The little boy just looked like he was playing around. I don’t think I would have spotted anything was wrong, but I know better now. Those lifeguards are brilliant

OH! Especially important in GB where your water tends to be very cold, and this is ESPECIALLY true in children. DO NOT give up on CPR too soon. Even after someone has been in very cold water for some time, they can often be successfully revived without long-lasting neurological effects. The cold slows EVERYTHNG down tremendously. When I worked in Respiratory Therapy, since I lived on the Gulf of Mexico, we took a seminar on drowning. The one thing that stuck with me was a specialist who told us, "KEEP GIVING BREATHS AND COMPRESSIONS! A cold-water drowning is not dead until they are WARM and dead."

I wish I had seen this thread 18 years ago. I waded into knee deep water with my two year old on a busy beach in Cornwall on a sunny summer day. We turned around to walk back to the shore and as we were ambling back the water was suddenly getting deeper instead of shallower. I grew up (abroad) swimming every day for months of every year and am a good swimmer, but I did not know about the tides on these long English beaches. I had never experienced anything like that incoming tide on any other beach anywhere in the world.

I started pulling my toddler along as fast as I could, but even so the water was getting higher by the minute. I was heavily pregnant as well, and not very hydrodynamic. Weirdly, even though when I was up to my chest and carrying a toddler no one offered me help and I couldn't see a lifeguard, though it was a lifeguard beach. sevenuld have shouted for help, but I thought I must have just waded into a depression in the bay and would soon climb out of it. Eventually I realised it must be the tide and we would not make it to shore before I was out of my depth. I did not feel confident I could keep both of us above water in my pregnant state and still move towards shore. The rocks below the cliff at the side of the bay were much closer so we made for them and made it as the water reached my neck. We had to scramble about 200m over sharp, barnacle cover boulders at speed to get to the shore before they were covered, but we made it. Luckily my two year old was nimble and fearless and scrambled like a champ because my balance isn't great to begin with and being seven months pregnant I could barely manage it myself.

If someone had just said to me that the tide can come in faster than you can walk, and it will go for hundreds of metres, I would never have gotten us into that predicament. Not knowing this nearly cost myself and two children our lives. (And I won't even go to North Cornwall - after 18 years the association is still too upsetting.)

Well done for this thread, OP. I hope it helps keep other people safe.

One of my most vivid memories as a kid, is of the tide coming in fast on a local (20 min drive away) beach. Parents grabbing the pram and a beach full full of people sitting on the rocks.

This may be one of the best threads I've seen on Mumsnet. I've read every single post, most of them twice.

At Wells-next-the-Sea there is a channel cut through the beach to allow the fishing boats to come in when the tide comes in. You can cross it easily when the tide is out, but it gets very deep when the tide is in.

They sound a warning siren when the tide starts to come in so that people don't get trapped by the incoming tide. It sounds quite scary, but I guess that is its main purpose.

Don’t know if the link works but this post on an open water swimming group shows the depth of Loch Lomond at various points near the shore to give an example why lochs can be so dangerous to non-swimmers. Those poor people at Pulpit Rock at the weekend didn’t stand a chance as the depth drops away almost vertically right from the shore.

www.facebook.com/groups/49738707266/permalink/10158208190597267/

[quote Snookie00]Don’t know if the link works but this post on an open water swimming group shows the depth of Loch Lomond at various points near the shore to give an example why lochs can be so dangerous to non-swimmers. Those poor people at Pulpit Rock at the weekend didn’t stand a chance as the depth drops away almost vertically right from the shore.

www.facebook.com/groups/49738707266/permalink/10158208190597267/[/quote]
Gosh that’s quite scary how close to the shore it gets so deep.

This might sound a daft question but does it make much difference if it’s 4m or 20m? Apart from
psychologically? If you can’t reach the bottom then you can’t reach the bottom. Or is the temp significantly different and you might have a chance still if it’s 4m.

I remember going to Pickmere when I was younger. It was a really popular place for families in the summer for paddling & swimming. The lake had depth markers on it. It went from something like 1ft to 20ft in a really short distance. Scared the bejesus out of me (thanks school safety videos).