Portsmouth, Va. – The Coast Guard conducted hoist training with Coast Guard cadets in the Pasquotank River on Friday.
All 12 cadets were given the opportunity to get in the water and have Petty Officer 1st Class Bret Fogle, a rescue swimmer from Coast Guard Air Station Elizabeth City, N.C., simulate pulling them to safety and being hoisted up to the MH-60 Jayhawk helicopter.
Cadets from the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., are at the air station for their week-long cadet aviation training program where cadets get to experience working at an air station.
Tuesday, the cadets went through training to learn how to be safely hoisted into a helicopter from the water and understand how to communicate to the rescue swimmer during the training. Once the cadets completed their training, they became qualified to be a duck, a simulated person in distress in the water.
“It’s good to have the different groups of cadets come out every week during the summer,” said Lt. Jenny Fields, the Jayhawk pilot during the hoist training. “It’s not often that the pilots and crew get to train with a large number of ducks. This training allows the cadets to experience what a person in distress would go through in benign conditions.”
