As the option of last resort when things go bad in offshore racing, the members of the SSR Safety Rescue Services team can’t afford to have an off day. They either do their jobs perfectly or someone can die. If that seems a tad dramatic, pause to consider offshore racers who perished such as Joey Gratton or Tom Gentry when a rescue didn’t go as planned.
Leave “good enough” for other professions. Rescuing offshore racers isn’t one of them. If you’re not up for perfect, you’re not up for the job.
But perfection is achieved through training, repetition and strict protocols. And that means for both rescue divers and racers.
Dunker training provided by the SSR Safety Rescue Services crew proved particularly relevant twice last Saturday during the Englewood Beach Waterfest World Championships in Southwest Florida when two boats overturned on the racecourse. The first came when the Cat 300 Jackhammer catamaran took a weird hop and rolled on the back-stretch of the course. The second happened with the Factory Stock GoGPS/Good Boy Vodka cat rolled in the final turn of the course.
Neither incident required “extraction,” meaning the rescue divers didn’t have to enter the cockpit to free or—in the case of an unconscious driver or co-pilot—retrieve an occupant. Divers deployed, assessed the situation and simply helped all four racers through the escape hatches and onto the bottoms of their overturned catamarans.
As it happened, rookie driver Brad Christopher was in the Jackhammer catamaran alongside throttleman Connor Langheim.
“It was Brad’s first time in a canopied boat so he had to do dunker training before he could race,” said Shawn Steinert, the leader of the leader of the SSR Safety Rescue Services team. “
“We spent some time with him at the pool and ran him through three times. Brad was very attentive at the dunker, and when the boat rolled he did exactly what he was taught.
“After the incident, he told us that he saw the Angel 1 divers looking in the windshield underwater—and was shocked to see a face looking at him because it happened so fast,”
“That’s a pretty cool perspective.”
Rob Lockyer, the throttleman of the GoGPS/Good Boy Vodka raceboat, and driver Christian McCauley exited their overturned raceboat with equal ease.
Actually, one retrieval was required that day.
“We did have to retrieve Brad’s prosthetic leg out of the Jackhammer boat for him,” Steinert said, then chuckled. “He removes it when he is racing in the canopied boat so it won’t get hung up on anything.”
Perfect again.