Do people bother with liferafts for coastal & cross Channel?

I have to do a sea survival course for work, clambering in to life rafts from the water is hard work even in flat water, if you carry a life raft you also need a strong young person to throw in first to pull you in!
 
nortada said:
I do! Fire on a yacht at sea is a great decider.
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However, "statistically" almost non existent on sailing boats. Not necessarily the fire, but as a cause of foundering and therefore potential deployment of a liferaft.

Three main causes are extreme weather, collision and structural failure - last one almost all on racing boats.
 
Tranona said:
However, "statistically" almost non existent on sailing boats. Not necessarily the fire, but as a cause of foundering and therefore potential deployment of a liferaft.

Three main causes are extreme weather, collision and structural failure - last one almost all on racing boats.
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Im sailing this past couple of weeks with me mate who was on that one. The yacht in Grenada that caught fire. Pictures posted on here.....exists, sadly.
 
SamanthaTabs said:
How many of us however have a properly packed grab bag on longer passages just in case? Not us anyhow..
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I have a grab bag. Lots of stuff in it, but more aimed at a drift in the Channel measured in hours, rather than surviving for weeks mid-Pacific.

Contents (copied from the laminated card I made to go inside the lid):

Flares
4 x rocket
4 x hand
2 x buoyant smoke

Electronics
PLB satellite beacon (under top flap)
VHF radio
GPS
GPS charging box & cable
GPS instruction card / mayday procedure
3 x torches (one under top flap)
Strobe
24 x batteries

Food
8 x 0.5l water (total 4 litres)
1 x liferaft ration shortbread
4 x chocolate
1 bag mints

Warm Kit
4 x thermal protective aids
4 x woolly hats

Tools & Materials
Multi-tool
Writing slate / cutting board & waterproof pencils
Gaffer tape
Electrical tape
Cordage
Cloths
2 x pots / bailers
Space blanket (warmth / visibility / radar reflector)
CD (sun signaling)

Comfort
2 x glow sticks
Spare glasses
Glasses wipes
2 x pack tissues
Playing cards

Loose
Dry bag for extra gear (in outside pocket)
Whistle (clipped to flare pocket)
Laminated document card (copy of passport, debit card, etc)
Extra plastic bags (for seasickness or to keep extra kit dry)

Pete
 
What a well balanced set of contributions to this thread!

I don't carry one. When we started cruising, liferafts were very expensive. We had a Tinker Tramp instead - I never got the liferaft conversion done to it, but always stowed it half inflated on deck. In that state it could also be launched to help in a man-overboard situation. And even when fully inflated the Tramp has a very low bow, which is easy to pull yourself onto out of the water.

Now the Tramp is well past its best and retired. So while I'm reasonably comfortable that the replacement tender will do as a last - if very unlikely - resort, I'm now a bit concerned that I haven't really got the m-o-b situation covered as well as before. But from what others say, a liferaft is really difficult to get into from the water, so that may not be best either.

My thinking on this problem was heavily influenced by the death of Rob James off Salcombe in 1983, a year or so before we started family cruising. If he'd had some kind of support from a dinghy in the water he'd have had a better chance of surviving the attempts to get him back on board.
 
Relying on a dinghy particularly a part inflated one is really clutching at straws. If you look at the reports of yachts that have foundered, whether liferafts have been deployed or not, you would be hard pushed to find an example where a dinghy would have been any help at all. As I suggested earlier, there are 3 dominant causes of foundering and they are almost all either in extreme conditions where even a liferaft can struggle or are catastrophic events. Interestingly in two cases where the foundering was in benign conditions where a dinghy might have been a viable substitute for the liferaft actually used, the need for either could have been avoided if the casualty had available a functioning VHF to summon help.

Should add a caveat that there have been examples where a dinghy has been a useful supplement to a liferaft, but these have been in founderings in oceans rather than in coastal waters as we are discussing here.
 
Tranona said:
Relying on a dinghy particularly a part inflated one is really clutching at straws.
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I guess it's comments/thoughts like that which makes people feel better if they carry a liferaft. I'm not saying you are wrong, but it is better than being totally unprepared, and a half inflated dinghy already on deck is more readily launched for other purposes.

And just carrying a liferaft is no guarantee that it will be successfully deployable or boardable in the circumstances. Plenty of things to go wrong here, as exemplified in recent MAIB reports on fishing boat fatalities. Not that I want to prick anyone's bubble here, we are after all thinking about very rare and mostly unique events from a yachting viewpoint.

Please don't think I'm arguing with you, just explaining my own thinking.
 
SolentBoat said:
'cos I don't.

Admittedly, 90% of my sailing is within the Solent but I do stray from time to time - sometimes across to France.

In fact, I was chatting about going this summer and the person I was chatting with was amazed that I had never had a liferaft on board. Am I exceedingly reckless? I work on the basis that I've got a tender in the event that I ever need to abandon ship and that'll I'll do all in my power to ever arrive at such an eventuality.
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I remember reading a story by this guy, Webb Chiles :

The second loss was as complete but took place during a single night in 1992 when I sank the (Stephen's She) 36' sloop, RESURGAM, off the coast of Florida, following which I floated and swam for 26 hours and was carried more than 125 miles by the Gulf Stream before reaching an anchored fishing vessel.

He was sailing solo in relatively good weather when for no apparent reason his boat dipped under the waves and sank. The only thing he thought to grab (or had time to ) was a credit card so that people would be able to identify the body.

He tried to let himself drown by sinking below the waves but could not willingly inhale water and so resurfaced. He had previously been a competitive swimmer and once a fishing boat passed him close by but nobody saw or heard him.

Some time earlier he had had a collision with a ship and, in retrospect, it must have weakened the structure although at the time it wasn't apparent. It would appear that the bottom of the boat just broke away.

Boats do sink, and sometimes quickly.

The rule in France is that you must have an ocean liferaft if you are more than 6 miles from a shelter. If you have a foreign flag, the authorities will not (or should not) control that. However I suppose all authorities have a power to restrict manifestly unseaworthy boats heading out into a dangerous situation.

WC has circumnavigated 5 times including one in an 18' open boat (although interrupted by his arrest by Saudi authorities as a potential spy). Perhaps then not surprising that he has been married 6 times.

PS Personally I would never contemplate a crossing without a liferaft and usually keep the dinghy inflated on deck too - what happens if the raft won't inflate ? - as happened in the '79 Fastnet.
 
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Ripster said:
We carry one, poised and ready to launch on the rail. We also have a dinghy (kept deflated though), life-jackets on all the time we sail, epirb, vhf x3 etc etc. Our view was that in the very unlikely event something dreadful did happen we want every chance and every tool there is to stay alive. We sail manly coastal but like others do venture offshore now and again. We thought about the dinghy instead of LR but then quickly realised that trying to stay in it in any sort of breaking sea has got to be very difficult. If we are really honest I guess it's more peace of mind than anything else.
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This would probably be the ideal dinghy then.

http://www.portlandpudgy.com/
 
Tranona said:
Relying on a dinghy particularly a part inflated one is really clutching at straws. If you look at the reports of yachts that have foundered, whether liferafts have been deployed or not, you would be hard pushed to find an example where a dinghy would have been any help at all. As I suggested earlier, there are 3 dominant causes of foundering and they are almost all either in extreme conditions where even a liferaft can struggle or are catastrophic events. Interestingly in two cases where the foundering was in benign conditions where a dinghy might have been a viable substitute for the liferaft actually used, the need for either could have been avoided if the casualty had available a functioning VHF to summon help.

Should add a caveat that there have been examples where a dinghy has been a useful supplement to a liferaft, but these have been in founderings in oceans rather than in coastal waters as we are discussing here.
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my yachtmaster examiner, who's name escapes me but others must have been examined by him, survived a week in in tinker tramp mid atlantic. Lucky I would say, but you can't say it's not better than nothing. Especially in a MOB situation. The Job James example pertinent.
 
Tranona said:
However, "statistically" almost non existent on sailing boats. Not necessarily the fire, but as a cause of foundering and therefore potential deployment of a liferaft.

Three main causes are extreme weather, collision and structural failure - last one almost all on racing boats.
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Statistics don't mean a lot when you are on fire.

In fact, in the survival game, statistics mean nothing when you are the statistic!
 
galadriel said:
My boat (an Etap) is unsinkable, but I still have a life raft. Because I understand although unsinkable they still burn.
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Ditto my Sadler. But I decided to spend the money upgrading my fire fighting equipment and still don't carry a liferaft. Each to his own.
 
I have a 4-man Seago on my little Rowan. It's bulky and heavy, but I bet it would take less time to deploy (hoping it will inflate - has been recently serviced by the way) than trying to inflate the rubber dinghy which has to be lashed to the foredeck.

We are off (hopefully) today towards Britanny, and I do feel better that we have the liferaft. Half submerged containers can sink a boat just as easy as being mown down by a ship, but I guess you might have a bit more time to abandon to the liferaft!
 
Babylon said:
Chap who taught me Day Skipper a few years ago, was crewing in a small racing yacht in the 1970s that sank off the Dutch coast.

They took to the liferaft.

Anyone want to hear the rest of the story?
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BlowingOldBoots said:
Yep, please tell, always like to hear about stuff like this, especially if there is a lesson in it.
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I don't know the reason why the yacht sank, but the whole crew safely got into the liferaft.

One guy, a 'rugger-bugger' according to the story, tried to fire a flare but didn't understand how to do it properly and it didn't work. To the utter dismay of the others, he then announced that the whole lot were useless and threw the entire pack into the sea!

As I recall it, they had no grab-bag, just the LR in which to keep them afloat. Everyone was sick, cold, and fairly frightened.

Eventually they were washed up on the coast. Local Dutch people were the model of kindness, giving them showers, food and drink, clean clothes, etc, and enough money to catch a ferry back to the UK.

Arriving here, passport-less and with no money, they were treated as scum by the immigration officers and their story not believed. Eventually let through, they all managed to hitch-hike their ways home and back to work.

Draw what lessons you may.
 
We've had a life raft for the last 20 years, so far unused. I work on the theory that if the water is too deep to stand up or we're too far off to swim back, then I'm going to drown or, die of hypothermia if wearing a life jacket - which is rare. Although we sail offshore regularly, I always feel coastal waters to be more dangerous with more vessels and obstacles to bump into.
 
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