Safety Tips for Swimming in the Wild

Outdoor sports carry relatively high risks, so it’s essential to strengthen safety awareness. We should focus on discussing and emphasizing how to avoid various accidents and how to perform self-rescue and rescue others when accidents occur. Whether you’re hiking, stream trekking, rafting, canyoning, orienteering, or engaging in other outdoor activities, you’ll often encounter rivers, lakes, and seas. As such, drowning is one of the more frequently occurring accidents in outdoor sports.

Principles of Safe Swimming

1. Understand Your Physical Health:
1. People with heart disease, high blood pressure, infectious diseases, epilepsy, skin diseases, eye conditions, etc., should not swim.
2. Do not swim when tired, sick, full, fasting, in a bad mood, or after excessive alcohol consumption.
3. Accurately assess your own abilities. Do not be overly competitive while swimming—swim within your limits. Those with poor swimming skills should avoid deep water or venturing too far from shore.

2. Choose a Safe Location:
1. Do not swim in areas marked with warnings such as “No Swimming” or “Dangerous Water Depth.”
2. Avoid swimming in shipping lanes, harbor areas, rapids, reef zones, near docks, or where aquatic plants grow.
3. If you encounter thunderstorms or earthquakes while swimming, get out of the water immediately.
4. Be aware of water temperature, wave conditions, wind strength, and currents.
5. Do not dive in unfamiliar areas or shallow water, and do not recklessly dive into deep water.

3. Develop Good Habits:
1. Warm-up exercises: Stretch before entering the water.
2. When swimming, try to breathe in through your mouth and out through your nose, inhaling and exhaling with your full lung capacity. Breathe rhythmically, avoid talking too much, and guard against choking on water.
3. Get used to swimming with your eyes open and wear goggles to avoid getting hit or kicked.
4. Swim with a partner so you can look out for each other.
5. For any water activity other than swimming, always wear a life jacket.
6. Do not joke around with actions that resemble calling for help.
7. Dry your body immediately after leaving the water to maintain body warmth.
8. Before swimming, carefully survey the water area and use buoys to mark deep/shallow zones and safe areas.
ii Causes of Drowning in the Wild:
Drowning occurs when a person is submerged in water and their airway is blocked by water, mud, weeds, or other debris, causing the larynx and trachea to spasm, leading to suffocation and oxygen deprivation.

1. Personal Factors:
1. Panic caused by choking on water can lead to loss of proper swimming form and result in drowning.
2. Accidentally entering deep-water areas.
3. Overexertion during swimming leads to physical exhaustion or impaired breathing coordination, resulting in physiological oxygen deprivation, such as muscle cramps.
When you feel physically exhausted after swimming for a long time, switch to backstroke—just gently move your limbs to keep your mouth and nose afloat on the water’s surface. Adjust your breathing, relax your whole body, rest briefly, then swim toward the shore or simply float while waiting for rescue. On the contrary, panic can cause all your muscles to tense up, exhausting your strength prematurely and leading to drowning.

II. Environmental Factors:
1. Wet, slippery, and rolling rocks with large gaps in between;
2. Significant differences in water temperature or excessively cold water;
3. Whirlpools and undercurrents: When swimming in rivers, you may sometimes encounter powerful whirlpools. In such cases, quickly move away from the center of the whirlpool along its tangent direction. Never attempt to tread water upright and swim directly against the current, as this may cause you to be sucked underwater by the strong vortex. If you are pulled underwater, take a deep breath before submersion and try to swim downward forcefully. At this moment, a strong will to survive is your only hope for rescue.
4. Variations in riverbed conditions;
5. Flash floods triggered by heavy rainfall.

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