Eric: If you find yourself taking a swim

that you didn't necessarily want to take,

a lot of things can happen.

Alex: The spectrum runs from

you might just slow yourself down and ruin your day

all the way to, you know, death.

Eric: Swiftwater Safety Institute is

a professional training organization.

Swiftwater is defined by the

National Fire Protection Association

as water that's actually moving at a rate

greater than 1.15 miles per hour.

Hang on! Hang on, guys! Almost there!

Eric: We got three days, action packed,

a class full of students training for river rescues.

We'll train US Military Special Forces,

we'll train fire departments, EMS personnel,

police and fire, commercial river guys.

We train recreational river users.

My name's Rich Nicholes, and I'm from western Utah.

In 2020, I found myself unemployed.

I'm at a point in my life where

to restart something over is a little challenging.

If there's one positive thing that happened to me

out of this, it gave me some new direction.

I decided I wanted to get into some guiding.

Scott: This morning, we're at Big Bend Campground

here on the Colorado River.

It's just about seven miles upstream from Moab.

Today's training is mainly focused on being in the water.

So, self-rescue and buddy rescue.

Alex: We're going to do what we call an adventure swim.

So, work on our body positioning

while we're in the water,

work on what's safe,

what's acceptable and what's not.

So, the ideal way for a swiftwater entry move

or, you know, the way that you're

going to jump into the water,

you want your PFD, which is the life jacket,

to hit the water first,

kind of keep your arms crossed up in front of your face

as you're jumping into the water,

and trying to kind of skip out into the rapid a little bit.

Rope!

Alex: We're going to introduce some ropes

in the form of throw bags.

I would consider the throw bag to be

the most basic rescue device.

A throw bag is simply a bag,

and inside of it is a length of floating rope.

You would throw that bag of rope to somebody,

hopefully landing, really, on them or very near to them.

They would grab that, and now we have a connection

between ourselves and that person in the water

where we can swing them into shore.

Rope!

Thank you!

You know, if you go out there, you have your throw bag

but you haven't been practicing,

and you throw and you miss,

you haven't helped the situation at all.

You might've made it more dangerous.

Secondary! Secondary!

OK, I got it.

You have an opportunity to fail

and people to support you to fail.

I definitely failed a couple times

throwing the throw bag, but then I also got it.

We're going to be working on

how to extricate someone who may have

caught a foot in the river and become entrapped.

It was a little bit too aggressive water for him,

and so we decided that what we'd do

is we'd set a human wedge up

in front of that particular person to give a water break.

Eric: We got our six-person wedge.

We may add two people in the back.

They're going to act as rescuers.

Rich: I had no idea just the amount of physical exertion

it was going to take just on that front person

to be at the front of that wedge.

Rich: Definitely want a bigger person,

but you also want a physically fit person

that's going to be able to kind of

muscle against that current.

I was getting tired!

Alex: We're going to have a river trip,

about a eight-mile river trip.

What that allows us to do is to get out there

and flip some of these big rafts over

and practice riding those

and the techniques involved with that.

So we had, you know, kind of mayhem in the water.

We had eight different people in the water,

eight different paddles, but we took our paddles

and stuck them under the gig line,

and then pulled back

to reset the raft upright in the water.

And then a couple of people were able to get in.

Other people were attempting to get in as well.

The people that were already in the raft

were helping those people get in.

It's a pretty chaotic situation,

so we want to just kind of

make that a little bit more static

and make some of those decisions easier

and get them somewhat of a format to follow

while they're flipping this boat.

Scott: We're going to build a tension diagonal,

and that's going to be used

to move gear or people across the river.

There you go.

Scott: We're going to be working on some knots.

So we're going to set up our

3:1 mechanical advantage

just to gain a little bit of force.

Eric: One of the specific knots we'll be teaching them

is this double fisherman's on a bend,

and then you pull it together.

Scott: It's used to join two ropes,

but mainly to create a Prusik loop.

You kind of drape that cord over a line,

and it wraps, like, three times

and then pulls tight.

It's a friction hitch,

so that when it's under tension,

it bites down on another line,

and we can pull it in a couple of different directions.

When we don't have tension on it,

we can loosen it and slide it either direction,

up or down that line that we're connecting to.

Say I were alone,

and I can pull on a rope

with 100 pounds of force.

Through a mechanical advantage system,

I can generate a larger force.

Students: 1, 2, 3.

1, 2, 3. Set the break.

We're going to clip that Prusik loop

with a carabiner onto that rope.

You know, we're going to walk out as far as we can.

We're not even going to be clipping in until, like,

down by that wave down there.

And then it's going to be left shoulder,

just like this.

It's going to set your body a little weird.

You're going to feel sideways to the current,

and it's going to help push you across.

Try to keep your whole body

on the downstream side of this rope.

We're going to teach students how to deploy

with what's called a live bait tether,

so they can be tethered onto their life jacket

with the rope and actually go swimming after somebody.

It's all patience.

All patience.

Yeah, wait, wait for it, wait for it, wait for it.

Sneak out there, wait,

and now keep going.

Doing the live bait recoveries, it was challenging.

You had a swimmer that was out

in some swiftwater moving past you,

and you needed to get to them

and drag them back in as quickly as possible.

Instructor: After you make contact,

give him a little bit there, Frenchy.

Probably good when you are, bud.

That's the real deal right there.

When you come into this class

as any level of user, you're going to walk away

with a more developed skill set than you showed up with.

And we see that from a lot of folks.

They just go, "I had no idea I didn't know that."

Quite a few people, probably 5,000 to 6,000 students,

have gone through our training program.

And those are the same students that work as river rangers,

that get jobs working for search and rescue units,

that end up going to the military,

that work for the Coast Guard.

Instructor: Rich, and now you're just starting off

on a new little adventure here,

so I hope this was a great way to kick it.

So, I found a guiding job here in Moab.

I'm doing a solid for a full year,

and this training is going to be able to help me

in making proper decisions when I'm out on the water

and keep myself and my guests safe at the same time.