STCW Training

I went to STCW training this week at a U.S. Coast Guard certified facility.  When I worked on cruise ship in Europe I wasn’t required to do much training at all, but with my current gig, I’m required to take 5 solid days of ship-related safety training including shipboard procedure, personal survival, elementary first aid and basic fire fighting.

I did a lot of belly-aching about having to do this training.  Logically, this is a pretty stupid thing they sent me to.  See, in my current gig I have full passenger status – so much so that I’m not even allowed in crew areas without an escort.  I’m not part of any safety planning on the ship.  If there’s an emergency and they decide to deploy the lifeboats, I get my lifejacket and I get on a lifeboat!

Despite my complaining about needing training that I will never use, the class ended up being really informative.  We learned CPR and basic life-saving skills like helping people that are choking, bandaging wounds, how to handle a life raft, how to swim with a lifejacket on.  We also fought fires; big ones – in full fire fighter gear!

We watched videos of cruise ships sinking, up-ending, tipping, turning and burning.  We heard about whole crews that panicked in emergencies, got in all the lifeboats and took off without any of the passengers.  We heard about a lot of terrifying situations, enough to get us to pay attention.

In case anyone tells you differently, this is the schedule for STWC training:

Monday thru Friday
8:00 am to 4:30 pm

The U.S. Coast Guard mandates that the training has to be 44 hours.  We were told before we went that it would be a breeze – maybe noon to 3, then head to the beach.  That, at least, was not my experience.  We were there all day.

There’s 5 days and 5 tests.  The last test, the fire fighting written test, is the difficult one, but it wasn’t as difficult as the instructors made it sound.