How to use a Life Jacket for Kayak River Rescue Belays

Video Transcript

"The best use of the rescue jacket is using it to keep yourself on shore and removed from the situation, even though you may be participating. And in this, much like using a buddy belay where you use an extra person to keep yourself on shore, this time you're going to be using your flip line and an anchor point to hold yourself in place. Take your flip line, wrap it around a solid object, create a loop for a short belay or, if you need it, create a girthage where you loop it through and that provides you with a longer belay if you need a little bit more room to work it. You then take this carabiner and attach it into the quick release belt of the rescue jacket making sure that it's fully locked and it's not gonna come undone. So, relatively a pre-emptive strike, so this is something that you're gonna think about ahead of time. This then allows you to move within a certain radius of the tree and put a lot of force on it so that if you've got a lot of people on the end of the rope you can support them and you can take the weight off the tree. You still want to make sure that your feet are taken care of. When you're setting up, make sure that you know what's upstream of you and what's downstream of you and when you throw the rope, "ROPE". This then allows you to take that tension that's too much for your body to then take it off the tree and just use your hip and that way your body is not taking the stress. If you need to you can then release from the belt to move off downstream."