Always wear a lifejacket no matter what boat you are in
Always be very careful about going in a river, and never dive into an unfamiliar river
Always check downstream for any hazards
Use the river safety position, when you need to
If you can’t swim stay out of the water!!!

Some facts about rivers :

A river is a natural stream of water that flows toward the ocean, a lake, or another stream. Usually larger streams are called rivers and smaller streams are called creeks.
 
The water in a river may have come from, a lake, a mountain or even damp, boggy countryside.
Water may also originate from groundwater sources like a spring.
 
Rivers have been used by humans for many things such as a source of water, for food, for transport, as a defensive barrier, as a source of power to drive machinery and as a means of disposing of waste.

In some countries like Canada, lumberjacks use the river to float felled trees (trees that they have cut down) downstream to lumber camps for further processing, saving a lot of effort and cost.

Apart from being a rich source of fish, rivers help other foods grow by supplying water for the crops. Because most rivers are a major source of fresh water, most of the major cities of the world are on the banks of rivers.

The length of a river is actually very hard to calculate. It depends on where the 'source' of the river is, where the 'mouth' of the river is, and the measurement of the river length between the source and mouth. As a result, the length measurements of many rivers change as the river changes. See if you can find out what a source and a mouth of a river are.
Even today there are many disagreements about whether the Amazon or the Nile is the world's longest river.

The River Nile is in Africa. It originates in Burundi, south of the equator, and flows northward through northeastern Africa, eventually flowing through Egypt and finally draining into the Mediterranean Sea.
• The Nile is about 4,160 miles (6,695 kilometres).
• The largest source of the Nile is Lake Victoria.
• The Nile basin is huge and includes parts of Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda, Congo (Kinshasa), Kenya.

The Amazon River is in south America and is the world's second longest river, but it has more water flowing down it than The Nile does, in fact no other river even comes close. It may not be the longest, but it is the widest.
• The Amazon produces approximately 20 percent of all the water that the world's rivers pour into the oceans, on its own.
• The biggest fresh water fish in the world is found in the Amazon. The pirarucu can weigh 550 pounds and measure up to 8 feet in length.

Helpful links :
www.riversafe.org.nz            http://www.watersafety.org.nz