A large group of 13-year-old junior surf life-saving members from the Brighton, Kaka Point and St Clair Surf Life Saving Clubs splashed down on Brighton Beach yesterday for the start of a two-day training session.
Brighton Surf Life Saving Club lifeguard Scott Weatherall said the programme aimed to teach them what a good lifeguard looked like.
"We show them how we behave; how we communicate with the community. We teach them about basic radio communications, basic signals for when we don’t have radios available.
"We’ve also taken them for swims around rocks and through seaweed, and we’re teaching them the basics of tube rescues and resuscitation."
Today they would visit the Otago Rescue Helicopter base in Mosgiel and do some more training at a swimming pool, he said.
"We’re teaching them some skills that will make it much easier next year when they train to become surf lifeguards."
Mr Weatherall said the recent spate of drownings around New Zealand had been sobering for the rookies and showed them how important the job was.
"It’s certainly a challenging time for surf life-saving and other rescue agencies, responding to a significant number of rescues in a very short period of time.
"It just makes what they do, even more real."
He said prevention was better than a cure, so training more lifeguards about how to prevent swimmers from getting into trouble was definitely going to be part of the solution.
"For us, it’s about teaching them how to do preventive actions, how to engage with the community, how to give them good information and education, how to support people so they can come back and swim between the flags."
