If you fell or got thrown overboard, how well would you be able to cope?
Jason Perlow
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If you either fell or got thrown overboard from a ship, how well do you reckon that you would be able to cope and be a good enough swimmer until some sort of help arrives, for example another ship going past?
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If it was the English channel, I reckon I could swim to the closest shore, considering I couldn't be much more than ten miles away from one of them.
Sorry to urinate on anybody's chips and all that, but that's the way it is.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-HaTWIznGE
Not unless you'd covered yourself in goose fat or wear a precautionary wet suit at all times when you travel you wouldn't :eek:
That was ace. Last bit was mental.
Depending on the water temperature and currents, I would hope that I'd be OK. Say, provided that the water temperature was 18 Celsius or more, and provided I was within eight kilometres or so of shore, I think I'd be able to make it. At say 13C, I might be in trouble even if I was only a kilometre or two from the shore.
My cold shock response is much reduced. I swam in 5C water without a wetsuit over the new year, and didn't experience any noticeable shock, e.g. no hyperventilation/gasping. I was definitely in there a bit more than two minutes, but not much longer. At that temperature, I would not be able to swim anywhere near a full kilometre. There are people I know who are much more resistant to the cold than me and who could swim much longer and further than me in even colder temperatures.
Edit: I looked up the Brighton sea temperature, and despite it being a temperate, not tropical, sea, the temperature is above 10C for much of the year. And over 15C for a bit of the year. At 15C or higher, even those not acclimatised should last a while before becoming hypothermic.
I've surfed in a lot colder, for a lot longer than it'd take to swim ten miles but I did have a wet suit on, so perhaps I'm being a bit ambitious there.
You'd have to give it a go though.
lol, well indeed
I wonder how much distance you get doing a stroke like, say, elementary backstroke after hypothermia has weakened a swimmer to the point where they can't do anything else.
Every time you come back you keep starting loads of threads.
WHY WHY WHY?????????????
I think the first and biggest issue would be get far away enough to avoid getting hit by one of the ship's propellers.
They do if they're aware of someone going overboard.
"P&O confirmed that the woman fell overboard on Friday evening, when a major search operation was immediately ordered, but it remained unclear last night why she had fallen."
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2210417/Body-British-woman-recovered-fell-overboard-P-O-Cruise-liner-Aurora.html#ixzz2LNjWRoGa
haha same as me. I also panic if I'm having a shower and I get water in my face. I prefer a shower with a detachable head or else I feel like I'm drowning
Sorry if I'm following up your joking comment in an over-serious fashion, but people do drown due to panic. Sometimes in water shallow enough that if they had control of their senses, they could just stand up and walk out.
Please don't tell me I could really drown in the shower
It has happened. http://tech.mit.edu/V117/N45/accident.45n.html