Community outreach is a vital part of maritime search and rescue (SAR). Engaging and educating the public and helping them to develop life skills that will help them in case of an emergency if stranded or stuck at sea can help save lives and make the job of SAR organisations more effective.

Salish Rescue, based out of Port Townsend in Washington, is one such organisation that is making sure to offer critical on-the-water SAR skills training for both adults and younger members of the local community and beyond.

“Our mission is to provide all-ages education for little to no cost to our community on the aspects of safe boating, small vessel operations and emergency response on the water. We coordinate with local emergency service agencies, as well as the US Coast Guard, to provide special mission SAR support in the area around Port Townsend. We also provide safety cover and skilled boat crew for scheduled community events like the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival, Race to Alaska, and the Kinetic Skulpture Race,” said Alden Rohrer, Lead Trainer at Salish Rescue.

Founded in 2004, Salish Rescue has since expanded its remit to offer a wider range of services and the area it covers to include more of the Salish Sea. Nevertheless, its training offerings remain the cornerstone of its community impact.

“The training programme is our main focus. While we provide emergency response capabilities and other outreach services to mariners of many stripes, we often view those as opportunities to put theory into practice. Most of our students will never run a real call outside of a scheduled event where we are providing safety cover, or a training scenario, but that’s okay. Our programme is more about life skill development than SAR itself. People often describe it as ‘a communications class disguised as search and rescue’ or ‘a leadership class disguised as search and rescue’,” Alden noted.

“Helping people and keeping our community safer is what it is all about,” said Rowen DeLuna who sits on the board at Salish Rescue. “By working with youth members to teach them about the importance of search and rescue, along with learning how to be a part of a team, how to lead and how to push themselves, is often life changing for kids who need some direction and passion in their lives.

“Rescue is more than plucking people out of the drink and towing boats. Its about helping to change the trajectory for someone who really needs it. Lives are saved in many different ways,” Rowen added.

As with most maritime SAR organisations, Salish Rescue faces its fair share of challenges. Over the last couple of years, it has been overhauling its training programmes to make them more accessible and transparent for anyone looking to see what the organisation does and how they can be a part of it.

“For the majority of our history, all of the curriculum, training standards and crew qualifications came from our founder’s head. As he is no longer involved, we’ve been piecing everything together based on the experiences of past students or in some cases starting from scratch. Getting our programme in writing is very important to us to ensure we can train our local community effectively,” Alden said.

The rewriting of its programme came at an opportune time for Salish Rescue as it recently had the chance to be a part of the IMRF’s regional meeting and maritime SAR workshop in Victoria, Canada, in June. Ahead of the event, Salish Rescue became an official member of the IMRF in order to learn from the wider SAR community and actively engage with like-minded organisations in the region.

“While we have strength in our team that brings a wealth of experience to their relevant fields, we realised we did not have strong ties with similar organisations that could provide guidance, or even a model, for how to address questions we had. Being a part of the IMRF and their recent event in Canada has given us that opportunity,” said Rowen.

“We’ve already been blown away by how enthusiastically supportive everyone we’ve met has been. We hope to include everything we’ve learnt so far in our internal overhaul process,” she added.

“We’ve seen how compartmentalisation of knowledge, skill, and resources leads to worse outcomes for the people we serve. Our belief is that the more we all collaborate and share openly with each other, the more we all learn. Having more confident, capable people in the world, who care strongly for the safety and wellbeing of their fellow humans, is what makes our whole world a better place,” Alden noted.