A comprehensive three-day certification course covering the California State Fire Marshal Open Water Rescuer curriculum, built around your department's operational needs and protocols.
The Open Water Rescuer – Basic course establishes your team's foundational ocean rescue certification and can be scheduled reliably, regardless of surf conditions, so you get consistent, department-wide readiness on a fixed timeline.
What this class is intended to accomplish is to work with your department's SOGs and SOPs, your radio frequencies and your equipment, and build a class with practical scenarios that we run through multiple times and through multiple iterations. Along the way we check every box the State wants, which lends credibility to the course.
We host the class in Ventura with partner agencies and utilize the entire coastline to train, from Ventura Pier down to Point Mugu, over three days. We're equally happy to bring the course to your location.
Certification requires each individual to hold a California State Fire Marshal ID number. Personnel without one can still participate and benefit fully from the class; they simply won't receive the State certificate, and the $75 State certification fee is dropped.
Request datesYou are the subject matter experts on your jurisdiction: the best watermen and women positioned to understand your role and your risk/reward analysis. We bring the curriculum, the instructors and decades in the water. Together we build the program, deliver it, and check every box along the way.
We meet in person or on Zoom to understand how you handle emergency operations, who your mutual-aid partners are, and where you fit into that system.
We build the class around your input: your equipment, tactics, strategies and protocols, mapped against the CSFM curriculum.
Classroom sessions where needed, then scenario after scenario on the coastline. Rock entries, surf, rips, submerged victims and recoveries.
Every State requirement is documented along the way. Certified personnel receive the CSFM Open Water Rescuer – Basic certificate.
We've had agencies ask for specific training that fell outside the standard curriculum. We built it into the course, delivered it, and still satisfied every one of the State Fire Marshal's requirements along the way.
If you were to enroll, step one is a conversation, not a syllabus. Then we build the class around that with your input. If no State certification is needed, that's fine too. The system still works.
Fire, harbor patrol, lifeguard, law enforcement and other public safety personnel who need a foundational, certified ocean rescue capability. It is designed for a department cohort so the whole team trains on the same protocols.
Only to receive the State certificate. Anyone can participate and benefit fully from the class without one; the $75 State certification fee is dropped for those participants.
We host in Ventura with partner agencies and train along the coast from Ventura Pier to Point Mugu. We can also travel and deliver the course in your jurisdiction, using your beaches and your equipment.
Three days. Classroom sessions where needed, then scenario-based training in the ocean. It can be scheduled on a fixed timeline regardless of surf conditions.
The Basic course does not depend on a large swell, which is why it can be scheduled reliably. Our one-day Heavy Water Training is the swell-dependent follow-on for personnel who already hold the Basic certification.
$950 per person. Every new client receives $100 off per person, and personnel who don't need the State certificate save a further $75. Contact us for a written proposal you can share with command staff.
Yes. The curriculum meets and exceeds United States Lifesaving Association (USLA) standards and is delivered per the California State Fire Marshal's Office.
Tell us about your department and we'll follow up with a written outline and available dates.
pacificsafetygroup@gmail.com · Ventura, California
