Category: Journey

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No Captain’s License if You’re Color-Blind?

I’ve known that I’m color-blind since I took the Ishihara test for the first time as a young adult – and failed very miserably. This has never bothered me and never kept me from doing anything I wanted. Until time came to apply for my German Coastal Waters Captain’s License, Sportbootführerschein SBF See.

When it became clear that there was no way I would pass one of the commonly accepted tests your GP or optician is able to give you, I started looking at my color blindness in more detail. In fact, most of these tests, like Ishihara or the Farnsworth D15 Test, are screening tests. They’re very good at confirming you have normal color vision. But if you happen to have some form of color vision deficiency, like 8% of men and 0.5% of women of European descent, the tests will not typically tell you what type or how severe.

That’s where things got interesting. The SBF medical evaluation form [German] says that if doubts remain after the screening test, an anomaloscope should be used to evaluate the type and severity of your color blindness. The examination with this apparatus yields a numerical value, the “anomalous quotient”, for each of your eyes. Normal color vision translates to values between 0.7 and 1.4. Values under 0.7 indicate “red weakness” (protanomaly), values above 1.4 “green weakness” (deuteranomaly).

Now, the good thing is that the German regulations provide for some headroom on the “green weakness” side. Values between 1.4 and 6.0 – translating to a moderate-to-medium deficiency – are still considered sufficient to pass. (You’re out of luck though if you happen to be on the “red weakness” side with a value under 1.4, unfortunately.)

I came in with values under 4 for both eyes after the examination at the Augenklinik Basel – well below threshold. What a relief! (Remember: I can hardly get an Ishihara plate right.)

My takeaway from this experience is that it’s always worth digging deeper on what the regulations really ask for. I’m quite certain other national regulations also provide that kind of leniency towards persons with “green weakness”, and be it only through license restrictions like being prohibited to navigate alone at night. The anomaloscopy wasn’t cheap, but it kept me from giving up on a dream – what better way to spend money?

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Learning About Medicine at Sea

How long has it been since you were last trained in First Aid? When you passed your driver’s license? In the army? For me, it was over 20 years back, so I very much looked forward to refreshing my knowledge and learning about the specific challenges of medicine at sea.

Due to COVID, the course had to be changed from two days onsite to one full day online and a short practical slot onsite which, given the epidemiological situation in Switzerland, is not to take place before February.

Martin Fischle of sailadventures.ch [German] did a fabulous job introducing us to the basics of medicine at sea based on his immense experience as both an ER nurse/instructor and a sailor.

The biggest challenge of medicine at sea is how long it takes until you can put a sick or injured person in the hands of a professional. I had never realized this before although it’s pretty obvious. In large cities, an ambulance may be 10-15 minutes away. Make this an hour in remote areas, and it still doesn’t compare to what you have to deal with on a boat. In one situation Martin described, it took more than five hours before a patient with a heart attack could be loaded into an ambulance. And that was from a boat just off Helgoland, an island near the German coast. One can only imagine what this means for a crew.

Among the many takeaways from the day, these were the most enlightening to me:

  • You may have to go on for hours with cardiopulmonary resuscitation. Even the best trained people can only do this for 15 minutes at a time. So look at the size of the crew and do the math.
  • Pain reduces the effect of life-saving measures, which means pain management is actually one of the most important activities by itself. On this topic, I also finally understood why my doctor brother always recommends combining two or three painkillers. There are three categories, acting at the injured location, on the communication to the brain, or on the brain itself.
  • People can get into serious trouble and die 24-48 hours after you pull them out of the water. Even small amounts of water in the lungs can cause them to get irritated and swell to a point where they will no longer work. Knowing this, one should be extremely attentive to breathing problems after near-drowning incidents, and always have a strong diuretic at hand that will eliminate water from the body quickly.
  • “No-one is dead before they’re warm and dead.” Would you have known that you can kill a person that has remained in cold water for a long time by merely moving them, or warming them up too quickly? In a severely hypothermic patient that doesn’t shiver anymore, pumping cold blood from the extremities into the relatively warmer heart can easily lead to deadly cardiac arrythmia. This means such patients must be handled with extreme care, and not given up on too soon. The lowest core temperature someone survived was 13 degrees Celsius.

I learned so much more in this course than in any first aid training before. Martin’s course is accepted as a Medicine at Sea training for the SYA bluewater license. I can only recommend it.

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Just in: My German/International Inland Waters Captain’s License (SBF Binnen)

Did you know the Swiss “Motorbootführerschein Kategorie A” can be converted into a German/International Inland Waters Captain’s License “SBF Binnen” without an additional exam?

All it takes is sending a physical copy of your Swiss license together with a recent passport photo and an authorization to debit around 35 Euros from your account to the Deutscher Motoryacht Verband DMYV. This is the application form (PDF in German; as of November 2020).

An international certificate is available from the Swiss authorities as well. It comes at a hefty price and has the disadvantage that it’s not valid by itself. You always have to have your Swiss license with you that comes as a bulky piece of paper. The credit card format is so much more convenient.

Looking into the future, my Coastal Waters captain’s license “SBF See” will just be added to line 11 of the card as “CWM <date>” once I pass my exam. There will be no separate license to carry around.

For now, I’m just going enjoy the SBF Binnen giving me access to inland water rentals in 21 countries, with 8 more currently listed as forthcoming.

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Know your knots

Every boating license inevitably comes with a basic set of knots you need to know. Here in Switzerland, these are [with German translations]

I hadn’t come close to any of these knots before in my life. I knew I’d need a lot practice. So I took a trip to the DIY store to buy some lines of different diameters and everything I needed to build this training board with cleats, rings and makeshift bollards made of ventilation duct.

The board went on to sit happily on my kitchen island unit, offering me an opportunity to practice whenever I waited for food to finish cooking. I don’t know how many hours I accumulated, but I sure knew my knots when it was time for the exam.