Training - The Dirty30

Alongside our station is a telephone wire, it doesn’t look very important but it serves a rather special purpose, to connect us, and the remote VHF aerial on Nine  Barrow Down to the Ops Room.  That’ll be the super high power aerial that covers most of the south coast. The relevance of this information may become apparent….

Last night was a Kit Night or ‘not another kit night’ as the lads call it – every month without fail; yes its mundane but the kit needs checking and signing for – every single bit of kit down to the last karabiner and there’s 36 of them.

So last night we decided to liven it up with a new station feature ‘The Dirty Thirty’ – The aim of Dirty30 is to provide a 30 minute training session where everyone gets their hands dirty. But this training session has a difference.

The difference being the team members are in direct in competition with each other – the loser gets to run the next Dirty30 training session the following month. No one wants to be the loser. It’s a way of training, having fun, motivating and giving others the chance to lead training. – What’s not to like !

Last nights task was throwing rescue lines. The lads warmed up on the lights

We adjourned to the car park to  throw the Perry Rescue Line and two other throw lines that we have. Six grow men standing in the cold throwing bags at a traffic cone… in the dark. The risk assessment was that there were no power lines , no cars, the neighbours cat was indoors and the absolute worst someone could do would be to let go of the bag too early and hit a team mate – not a danger – just funny. There was a telephone cable to the left of us but there was no way on earth that anyone would be so incompetent to hit that, I mean you couldn’t hit the telephone line even if you tried. (I hope I’m not telegraphing what’s about to happen).

Now we are not a supportive ‘everyone wins - prizes for all’ outfit, basically if you come last you’re going to get mercilessly mocked until another opportunity comes along to mock someone else in team.

Let the tossing commence – and it did. Brian was in early with a good throw, followed by Lee and Roger Roger, all landing close to target Nick then spoilt things by throwing his into the tarmac and conceded that he might be the loser .  Ian and Gareth had competent, quality throws….. but you’d expect that of the management :-). I don’t want to bang on about it but, they were rather good throws.

Round two of training the throwing completion saw a stinker of a throw from Ian , while Nick managed to redeem himself with quality effort; at this point the smart money was on Ian coming bottom of the leader board and leading the raining.  Roger Roger and Lee threw well, and Brain, well Brian was sublime.

Most people in Nick’s position would have settled for a place ‘mid table’ but Nick wanted to prove he was a better tosser than Brian. To be fair this is a challenge as everyone on station always remarks at Brian being the top tosser.

Nick took position, settled himself, took aim – I’m not sure what at – and ‘launched’ the Perry Rescue Line..….

It would be fair to say there was an anxious moment as we saw the trajectory of the line –sharp intake of breath - towards the neighbor’s shed..... ! 

It looked bad….but luckily for Nick there was an important telecommunications line to save his blushes. Nick provided a quick bow to acknowledge his effort - and we all clapped in an enthusiastically sarcastic supportive manner.

Nick will be running the Dirty30 next month. – he’s says its going to be a cross country race!