Snatch rescue

We shouldn't have had a rescue training! But our training officer had forgot, so we had one anyway. And we were going to do snatch rescues; I'm not sure if there is a clear definition of this, but it boils down to someone being stuck, and then a rescuer being lowered to them, attaching themselves to this person, and both then either being hoisted up or lowered down to safety.

We met somewhere about an hour East. That also meant I could try out my new satnav set-up. I didn't quite work as intended! The telephone holder I had bought would not stick to the windscreen. I improvised with the old bracket of my broken satnav, and a few elastic bands. It did the job!

We would do this at the surface! There was a useful gorge we could take advantage of. So we carried our kit to this gorge, and set to work. Maybe we were a tiny bit distracted by the fact that our team member Tom had brought his rather charming dog. And the dog is quite keen a lot of attention!

The main thing we did was set up a rig at the top, and lowering a pretend casualty down, on a fairly old rope, to somewhere halfway down or so. Then we would lower a pretend rescuer down on a double rope. They would indeed attach themselves to the casualty, and then cut the (old) rope. We then just lowered them down. And from there they could walk back up!

In action

We took turns. The old rope was long enough to do this several times! And we practised cutting the rope in a safe way. It is important you only cut that one specific rope and nothing else. One way of doing that is cutting it with a piece of string. That works!

We stopped when the light was fading. This was a surface exercise, after all! And we carried everything back to the cars. This would be our last exercise before the AGM!