Kiama Council's lifeguards are taking a well-earned break over winter following another busy patrol season.
Our lifeguards put in 375 patrol days, keeping an eye on more than 275,000 people who visited our local beaches between September and April.
Seven Mile Beach remains the favourite destination for those taking a dip, followed by Surf Beach, with Jones Beach the quietest.
While there was an increase in beachgoers compared to the previous season, the number of rescues (104) was lower, and there were no fatalities.
This continues the success of our lifeguards' proactive approach to safeguarding beach visitors through preventative actions.
Preventive actions are when lifeguards engage with a swimmer to ensure they're aware of potential dangers.
The success of the patrol season is also due to the strong partnership between our Council lifeguards and volunteer surf lifesavers.
Our three surf clubs once again provided crucial support, patrolling their local beaches (Jones Beach, Surf Beach and Werri Beach) on weekends and public holidays.
Our lifeguards were also able to deliver their surf education program at our local primary schools in the lead up to the patrol season.
This provides our young local beach-goers sun safety to surf survival techniques, as well as information about the inherent dangers when visiting our beaches.
Photo: Our I.T. team helping our lifeguards learn how to use their new online reporting system
Finally, an important improvement this season was equipping our lifeguards with iPads on their patrols.
The iPads allowed our lifeguards to connect to a dedicated online portal to complete their daily beach, first aid and incident reports.
This has been significant improvement on the paper-based logbooks used for many years.
The online portal also provides access to real-time weather alerts, training and support resources.
