A Fishing Vessel Drill Conductor workshop is being offered to Michigan mariners to better prepare for emergencies on the Great Lakes.
The workshop will teach boaters about safety equipment and procedures that are important to know during an emergency on the lakes.
Classes will cover things like cold-water survival skills, signal flares, overboard recovery, and fire fighting.
Ronald Kinnunen is the course instructor. He said this isn’t the first time he’s run this program.
“We did six of them in the Great Lakes region last year so we’ve done some in Wisconsin and some in Michigan and basically we covered from Lake Superior to Lake Michigan all the way down to Saginaw Bay on Lake Huron, and we had 77 people train through the course including three from the United States Coast Guard.”
Kinnunen said the program runs about ten hours. He recommends commercial mariners take the course every five years.
“The captain should conduct these drills once a month, and basically you mimic some kind of emergency whether you’re going out to your fishing and the captain basically does an unannounced drill where you mimic a fire or man overboard or something like that to keep the crew up to date.”
The workshop is scheduled for 8am July 11th at the Bay Mills Resort and Casinos in Brimley, Michigan. 11386 W. Lakeshore Drive.
For more information or to register for the workshop, click here.