Lee-Anne, who works at Water Safety NZ, brought along the life jackets as well as her expertise to teach us how to survive out there in NZ's varied waters.
We learned that we should be snug as a bug in our life jackets.
This is us sculling down the pool, the way we would float down a river... feet first, to keep our heads from bashing on rocks or trees.
Sometimes, we can throw something to someone who is struggling to breathe. We learned to throw the object next to the person, not at them. We also learned that we can make use of things like buckets, cones, chilly bins for flotation devices. Children are allowed to rescue people by throwing items, but only adults are allowed to get in the water to rescue someone.
We know that we always need to wear our life jackets when swimming in rivers, lakes and when we are on boats, but if, for any reason, we are not wearing our life jacket and need to put it on in the water, here's how we do it. We sit on the life jacket and then we slide our arms into the arm holes. From there, we can zip it up and do up the straps easily.
This last picture shows how you can use your life jacket as a flotation device by sitting on it and sculling with your arms to get to shore.
