Type II PFDs are designed not only to provide flotation, but to help turn a semi-conscious or unconscious person face up in relatively calm water. For a child or non-swimmer on a casual boating trip, that can be very important. For scholastic rowers accompanied by a coaching launch there are different priorities.
The most important rule for rowers in the event of swamping, capsizing, or an accident, is to stay with the boat. Assuming that everyone’s a competent swimmer, they hold onto the boat, there’s a launch keeping an eye on them – and that the water’s not too cold – the situation should be more annoying or embarrassing than dangerous.
So why are PFDs carried on the launch? Perhaps the most likely scenario in which they would be necessary would be one or more shells capsized by a squall, with a launch too small to get all the rowers out of the water. In an account of one such accident a coach wrote, “in a period of about five minutes the day went from sunny and perfect to absolute blackness. This insane storm blew in… and suddenly there were seventy kids in the water.”
If you’re on a launch and you have to throw a PFD to a rower who is in the water, or holding onto a boat, it is much easier to throw a flotation cushion than a PFD: it’s heavier, more compact, and can be thrown farther and with more accuracy. If it reaches the rower, all they have to do is hang on. What the coach point out in our discussion was that that is the way rowers use the Type II PFDs. They don’t put them on (because it’s too difficult), They just hang on to them.
If you’ve ever tried to throw a Type II PFD into the wind, you know it’s not something you want to do when someone’s life depends on it.
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*Note: In September of last year, the US Coast Guard announced it was abandoning the term PFD. (Not its emphasis on their importance, just the terminology!) For more than twenty years the Coast Guard has used the term PFD, an abbreviation for Personal Flotation Devices, in referring to life-jackets and other flotation aids, and they were divided PFDs into five categories, I, II, II, IV and V. Those categories have now been discarded. The terms PFDs and Personal Flotation Devices are generally used in technical literature; the term “lifejacket” is generally used in public information circulars.
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