Â鶹´å

By Mark Muckenfuss

“Man overboard!”

Kelsi Sigurdson’s voice cut through the noise of the boat engine and the wind whipping across Â鶹´å, alerting Taylor Leischner at the helm that a crew member was in the water. 

Actually, “crew member” is probably a liberal use of the term. It was a dummy, thrown over the gunwale by Korri Basinger. 

Basinger, Leischner and Sigurdson were all students in a motorboat operator training course, being taught how to handle this particular emergency by Andrew Morgan, manager of marine operations at the Â鶹´å Aquarium. 

As Basinger and Sigurdson pointed toward the “victim,” Leischner swung the boat around in the choppy waters, initiating the rescue. 

“Mayday!” she yelled into the boat’s radio receiver. “We have a man overboard.”

“He’s at 9 o’clock! 11 o’clock! 1 o’clock!” Basinger and Sigurdson shouted in turn as Leischner oriented the boat and pulled alongside the dummy. There, they hooked it and, using a net, pulled it back on board, where they then practiced checking for vital signs. A few minutes later, after listening to Morgan critique their performances, the students changed positions and ran the drill again. 

The exercise is just a small part of a four-day course in boat operator safety offered by Cal State Â鶹´å’s Boating Safety Program and the College of Extended Learning and International Studies. Â鶹´å is one of a very few organizations to offer such a course for instructors, said Nicholas Nechay, who oversees the program.

"We are currently one of the only CSU campuses that consistently run this training, and we have the highest volume," Nechay said. “We’re positioning ourselves to be a strong presence in the boating safety world.” 

It comes, in part, as the CSU is pushing for more stringent safety practices. 

“The CSU, in general, is pushing for more standardized training for scientific boating,” Nechay said. “Before that, it was the wild, wild West. It was very underregulated.”

In addition to Â鶹´å, UC Davis and Oregon State University have boating safety programs, run out of Bodega Bay and Newport, Oregon, respectively. 

Currently, Â鶹´å’s program is focused on the scientific community, training marine researchers who work with agencies and institutions such as the California Department of Water Resources, Moss Landing Marine Labs, California Department of Fish and Wildlife, UC Santa Cruz, the Â鶹´å Aquarium and more. 

“We get a lot of scientists and researchers who have never been on a boat before,” Nechay said. “They’re learning basic seamanship as well as boat operation. That’s just Step 1. There’s a lot that happens in four days.”

While Morgan was running man-overboard drills in the bay, Brie Pilone, a Master of Marine Science student at Â鶹´å, was on a quieter mission showing three other students how to safely dock a small boat using different approach angles. Pilone spent five years with the NOAA Corps, a service affiliated with the U.S. Coast Guard, and has been teaching boat safety courses for a year. 

“I love trying to spread the knowledge of fundamental boating for students,” she said, part of which is helping them understand the particular challenges of navigating Â鶹´å, which include “the abundance of marine life. We always have to be ready to dodge and maneuver.” 

Students do classroom work and also have sessions in and around the Â鶹´å Aquatic Center pool. 

For Kelsi Sigurdson, an environmental scientist with the Department of Water Resources’s Red Bluff office, the course was a chance to ensure that she and her colleagues would be safer as they gather water quality data in Lake Oroville. It will also give her the opportunity to be the boat operator more often.

“I think this training was even more helpful than I expected,” Sigurdson said. “The main thing was confidence-building and learning to communicate. I’m more aware of things that could happen. So, overall, everything is going to be in better hands now.” 

Nechay said the program pays for itself and actually makes money, which helps keep such courses going. He is hoping to begin a recreational boating safety course for the general public next year. 

“We could run one of these a month,” he said. “There is a very high demand. Amongst our agency partners and neighboring institutions, we have close to 100 people on the waiting list.” 

Class size is limited to 12, to meet the required instructor/student ratio. But, Nechay said, they are getting the job done. 

“We feel really good about what we're doing,” he said. “We feel we’re sending people out to do work in a way that’s safe.”