May You Never Hear These Words—Ditching, Ditching, Ditching.

Stopping into Starbucks at 6:50 in the morning is where I start to wake up. While at the drive through the first drops of a long awaited summer rain started to fall. I got my Chai Tea Latte and proceeded to head out over the highway for a survival adventure.

I arrived at the Offshore Safety and Survival Centre to register for my Survival Course. Entering the class and was reminded that I miss school; it’s been a long time. I was the only girl. That’s often the case for me in the Oil and Gas industry. There were people from all over the world, Houston, Hong Kong, and Trinity Bay – it’s a global game. And just when we were about to start, my token female friend, Sarah skipped in to join me and the guys.

What’s this course all about? It’s designed for people who are about to go miles out into the great North Atlantic Ocean and visit an offshore installation. It’s designed to keep us safe and to know the dangers and the possibilities of basic survival training offshore. We are about to discover the hazards of the marine world like never before, how to respond, and how to survive. Holy crap!

Here at the Offshore Safety & Survival Centre in Foxtrap, Newfoundland, they plan for “What if”. Think about it, when you’re offshore you want to have every possible survival scenario scoped out. You want to know your alarm signals, escape routes, methods of survival, muster stations, survival craft, alternate station, where the life jackets are, and how to use them, evacuation suits, warm clothing, and smoke hoods You want to know that wearing wool is better than anything else because wool doesn’t hold water, but it keeps heat in. What ifs are probably the most important questions you will ask!

We’re about to be immersed into the world of installation abandonment, handling injuries, cold water shock, fatigue, psychological matters, dehydration, sea sickness, and hypothermia. We are getting it all.

We’ve had too many accidents to know that learning about the “what ifs” is critical. Piper Alpha–167 lives lost, Alexander Kielland–123 lives lost, Sea Crest–91 lives lost, Glomar Java Sea–81 lives lost, and offshore Newfoundland in some of the toughest sea conditions on Earth, the Ocean Ranger offshore disaster–84 lives lost.

So my Basic Survival Training begins. This is a basic level course designed to provide personnel with an understanding of the hazards associated with working in an offshore environment, with the knowledge and skills necessary to react effectively to offshore emergencies, and with the knowledge to care for themselves and others in a survival situation. My palms are getting sweaty; all I can think about is being dunked in the simulated chopper crash and trying to find my way out.

The instructors are truly awesome, very well spoken, and extremely knowledgeable. That alone is enough to set you at ease. They’ve done all this a thousand times and yet, they are safety conscious enough to treat it like the first.

The morning was full of theory, hazards, accidents, emergency response, personal buoyancy gear, evacuation, survival crafts, signalling, and rescue to safety systems and procedures. All of this was the foundation of the material that then led to the practical applications. The application that included wearing cumbersome survival suits and mastering the obstacles before us in a massive swimming pool, big enough to simulate a helicopter crash–yikes!

Ditching, ditching, ditching, that’s what you hear as you’re taking a chopper dive into the water. You are buckled into the seat with your survival suit on as the simulated chopper drops down and hits the water with a massive splash. All hands onboard, she hits, and then she immediately rolls. Yes, you are upside down, strapped into a chair, in a chopper, under water!

You have two choices: hold your breath and panic, or hold your breath and stay calm. Staying calm is probably the single biggest asset you have in surviving underwater. Being calm allows you to see that it just takes a few seconds for the bubbles to clear. Once clear you can then see your way to powerfully elbow your window and knock it clear out of place. Your window is your opening and you don’t take your eyes off it. At this stage, where you look is where you go!

All my faculties are at peak alert. My heart is racing which makes my thinking laser sharp. My survival instincts are on bust and I have one goal—get out! Intuitively, I unbuckle myself out of the seat, hold onto the window perimeter and get my ass out of that chopper. It takes about three seconds and it feels like an hour. Once through the window, nature takes its course and my survival suit is so buoyant that it bobs me to the surface. I did it!

Not leaving anything to chance, the teachers of this program take you through the chopper dunk procedure, not once, not twice, not three times, but four times! By the forth and final time your nerves are a little bit calmer, your understanding is a whole lot better, and your experience tends to show you the way. It’s like riding a bike and learning to balance, you can’t really understand balance, until you do balance. And that’s the validity of this course. You can’t really understand survival, until you do survival.