Personal Survival Training

So I'm going to dedicate a whole post to PST Training or otherwise known as Wet Drill. On Saturday morning I get up bright and early to find out that my best friend managed to get appendicitis overnight and ended up in the hospital to have his appendix out...! So after some texting and face booking to find out what had happened, we left at 9.15am and I stepped onto land for the first time in a week at Castaway Cay (CC).

So the first part of PST was a talk through of the life jacket, the raft and the survival suit. Basically a recap. Then we watched a couple of the safety officers demonstrate what we were going to do. They made it look super easy so I felt okay about it. We got into our life jackets and firstly had to jump off the little pier into the sea... It was probably only a drop of about 6 feet/2 meters so that was fine. As you are wearing your life jacket you actually float immediately back up anyway so it's a brief second you're underwater. The sea is so warm at CC at this time of year it was amazing! The only thing I didn't think about was the sea salt and so my eyes were super stingy for a couple of minutes afterwards. 

Next, once everyone was in the sea, we had to float our way into a circle and adopt the "safety position" which is basically linking elbows with the person next to you and hugging your knees. So we all got to know each other quite well hahaha. 

They pulled two people out of the circle at a time to swim away a couple of meters and then prove they were capable of taking their life jacket off, floating in the water for about 10 seconds and then putting the life jacket back on which was actually quite easy. The life jacket is bulky but it's just like pulling apart two big blocks of polystyrene held together with Velcro, easy.

Then came the hard part. They partnered up a boy and a girl together (for strength reasons) to flip a life raft over from being upside down. These things are BIG and HEAVY... About 12 feet across. So the boy first had to lift himself onto the raft (I was paired with Neil, Rob's roommate who is in guest services) and then he helped me onto the raft. That was the hardest part by far... I have no upper body strength and the whole thing would be 100x easier if you weren't wearing a giant life jacket on top. Eventually, rather like a beached whale, I got onto the life raft and then we had to balance ourselves and stand up, holding the two guide ropes and then lean back, using our body weight to pull the life raft over... Swim back out from underneath the raft still holding onto the rope and TA-dah! You were done.

Then just swam out and did a short written test. PST training was complete for 5 years. It was much less scary and difficult than I thought, just a bit tiring. Also, lying on your back in the sea for over an hour with the bright sun reflecting off the sea and your luminous yellow life jacket and into your eyes is both uncomfortable and sunburn-producing! So my number 1 tip for people doing PST is to wear lots and lots of suncream!!! And also, if you wear contacts, to bring spare pair. 

Literally, the £2500 ($4000) I spent on laser eye surgery back in February was worth EVERY SINGLE PENNY for that day alone!