Entering a liferaft

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Storyline

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A question aimed mainly at those who have entered a liferaft from the water on a sea survival course.

I have just bought a budget coastal raft (crewsaver) but according to the recent review in pbo it has nothing inside to grab hold of to help pull yourself in.

I have had a thought which is to glue some pads onto the floor when it has it's first service so I can attach a rope or something similar to pull on.

Does that sound sensible (and any other tips from people who have actually tried to enter a raft from the water) ?

Many thanks
 
You should be able to hoist yourself into the liferaft by holding onto the tube at the entrance, getting the tube under your armpits and scramble yourself in. This assumes that you are in the water.
Far better to step into the liferaft from your sinking vessel; remember that you always step up into a liferaft. If you are stepping down then it's too early to abandon ship.
Yes, I have actually done it.
 
ArthurJStoatfondler said:
...remember that you always step up into a liferaft. If you are stepping down then it's too early to abandon ship.
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Is that some quaint but daft old-world principle, or is there reason in it? Presumably if the yacht has gone down three feet in the last half-hour, there's no doubt she's doomed?
 
dancrane said:
Is that some quaint but daft old-world principle, or is there reason in it? Presumably if the yacht has sunk three feet in the last half hour, there's little doubt she's going down?
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Not to be taken too literally but to remind people not to abandon ship to soon; staying with the boat is always safer in heavy seas than being in a liferaft as long as the boat is still able to float, even if waterlogged.
You can call it some daft principle if you like but there have been cases of people taking to liferafts and their boats being found later, abandoned but still afloat, as in the ill fated Fastnet race some years ago.
Is there a reason for it? Yes, as a reminder that you don't get into a liferaft unless your boat is really sinking. If your boat is on fire that's a different matter.
 
No just a cliché, with some truth to it.
Each circumstance will be different, the concept is to stay with the boat or ship until it is no longer safe to do so. Because even damaged the boat is probably warmer, safer, drier, and more easily found than the raft.
Judging the time to abandon will be down to the skipper at the time. The important thing to be prepared to abandon early. So everyone can should it become necessary.
Examples of where someone got it wrong. Would include an Italian Cruise Ship and a Korean Ferry
 
Storyline said:
A question aimed mainly at those who have entered a liferaft from the water on a sea survival course.

I have just bought a budget coastal raft (crewsaver) but according to the recent review in pbo it has nothing inside to grab hold of to help pull yourself in.

I have had a thought which is to glue some pads onto the floor when it has it's first service so I can attach a rope or something similar to pull on.

Does that sound sensible (and any other tips from people who have actually tried to enter a raft from the water) ?

Many thanks
Click to expand...

No not sensible. The raft is designed for a purpose with the correct glues and strengthening in particular locations.
better spend the money and time to do the sea survival course. boarding a raft from the water will be much, much, harder in the sea than in a warm pool but it will still give you an idea.
if you get a chance to see one of your rafts inflated it would be worth while.
Come to think of it I have not seen mine inflated or a youtube video if it inflated. but they are all quite simillar
 
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ArthurJStoatfondler said:
Is there a reason for it? Yes, as a reminder that you don't get into a liferaft unless your boat is really sinking. If your boat is on fire that's a different matter.
Click to expand...

Hmm. I never understood the urge to abandon ship just because she's leaking a fair bit.

I wonder how practical or impractical it must be, using the latest closed-cell foam, to fill all unused hull-cavities with buoyancy - prohibiting the flooding of such spaces and preventing or substantially delaying foundering.
 
When you do a sea survival course you always encourage a youngster in first to pull you in! By the time there are 8 of you in there like wet seals you can't move.
 
dancrane said:
Hmm. I never understood the urge to abandon ship just because she's leaking a fair bit.

I wonder how practical or impractical it must be, using the latest closed-cell foam, to fill all unused hull-cavities with buoyancy - prohibiting the flooding of such spaces and preventing or substantially delaying foundering.
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I think Sadler and a few others did this.
The idea being to create sufficient reserve buoyancy from the foam so the flooded boat would remain afloat.

It shouldn't be to hard to work out.
My boat for example has a designed weight of 10500 lbs or just under 4775 kg.
In order to remain afloat if flooded it would need to continue to displace more than 4775 kg of seawater or about 4.66 cubic meters of sea water.
I would need to distribute about 4 cubic meters of foam around a 35ft boat. in fact it would be less since the boat would still displace some sea water even though flooded. even the lead keel is still displacing its volume of seawater. empty water tanks poo, tanks, fuel tanks, packages of pot noodles all help a bit.

sinking a boat is actually more difficult than you would think.
 
Quite so. I'll be stuffing my big dinghy with over a hundred empty 2-litre lemonade bottles, accumulated in the last eight months...

...they'll actually add about 4kg, but also provide several hundred kilos of flotation, should the worst happen.

If I had a ballasted yacht, I'd do the same, because, why not? :)
 
dancrane said:
If I had a ballasted yacht, I'd do the same, because, why not? :)
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Because usually you want to use the space for something more useful.

A proper foam-fill using mostly inaccessible spaces is one thing, but filling all your lockers with old pop bottles is something else and a real pain on a boat you want to live in for a week, or two, or more.

Pete
 
dancrane said:
It was definitely the unusable/inaccessible spaces that I was referring to. :)
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Not many of those on a well fitted-out yacht.

I can think of three on Ariam, and I know her inside out. Two are under the sole in places that are not the bilge per se (each is fully occupied by three two-litre bottles of water as a secret reserve) and one is under the galley drawer unit (earmarked for an oversized electric emergency pump one day). Other than that, every cubic inch is either machinery/systems space, accommodation, or stowage.

EDIT: Actually there's one more, a shoebox-sized void above the lifejacket locker. But you'd need something a bit more space-age than pop bottles to float five tons of boat with that :)

Pete
 
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prv said:
...every cubic inch is either machinery/systems space, accommodation, or stowage.
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That's remarkable. I'd have supposed that flat floors over a curving bilge below, and straight sofa-backs/galley/bathroom units which are some distance from the curving hull behind, would leave lots of empty cubic inchage. I don't doubt your reckoning, but I'm not sure the AWBs and MABs I've spent time on in the past, made such good use of space.
 
I once did a sea survival course in a very cold outdoor swimming pool. Even having boarded the raft a few times from the water previously by way of practice, once slightly sapped of energy by the chill of the water, it was difficult to get in to say the least, especially whilst wearing an inflated lifejacket and oilskins and boots filled with water. Frankly, add in a rough sea state, and I'm not sure I'd have made it in on the last go. Most of the others on the course didn't as the first effects of hypothermia set in. That said, I'd certainly not be intending to have spent over an hour in and out of the water in a real life scenario, but who know what other similarly sapping occurrences might have gone before in such an event?

Prior to worrying about getting in, do you know how to right the raft should it deploy inverted?
 
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dancrane said:
That's remarkable. I'd have supposed that flat floors over a curving bilge below, and straight sofa-backs/galley/bathroom units which are some distance from the curving hull behind, would leave lots of empty cubic inchage. I don't doubt your reckoning, but I'm not sure the AWBs and MABs I've spent time on in the past, made such good use of space.
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Well, there is the bilge, I suppose. I didn't allow for that and you could fit some pop bottles in there. Not all that many though, there's only about four to six inches between hull and sole boards, and then only in the central area. That's a 90s AWB hull shape for you.

As for the idea that square furniture leaves a gap behind it against the hull, that's a crazy way to build things. You don't lower in a cuboidal chest of drawers and just push it up against the hull side. The fronts of the lockers may be straight, but the backs and bottoms are simply the hull. Drawers can waste some space behind, but our galley drawers run fore-and-aft instead of out to the hull side, so their vertical back surface doesn't waste any space. The fridge is shaped to roughly follow the hull, and then the precise shape is filled with the insulation. The pan locker has a vertical back, or it would be too deep to reach in easily, but there's an access trap in the worktop into the space behind and it's full of tins and jars. The bottom of the cooker swings through an arc that more or less matches the hull, and where swing and hull begin to diverge significantly there's another vertically-accessed stowage full of jam and gravy paste and olive oil and marmite and god knows what else. The settee backs provide bedding stowage for whoever is sleeping on those berths, and everywhere else some kind of locker or shelf or the edge of a bunk is running right up to the hull.

I don't think our boat is unusual, you just need to understand what's behind the square surfaces you see and realise that the space behind them is mostly not wasted.

Pete
 
Hmm, I realise shore-style furniture isn't given room aboard anything but super-yachts; still, it sounds like your boat doesn't waste any space, and I've known boats which did.

I lately found some of my boat-layout drawings from 30 years ago. In my innocence/ignorance, I'd drawn seat-backs pressed right up against the outermost extremity of the hull. :o

About the same time, I saw drawings of the interior of the schooner America, which showed how an interior of plush, upright, square-backed sofas fitted closely into the oblique lines of the outer timbers. Fascinating deception which concealed the restrictions of the vessel's form and gave an impression of cavernous shore-style space...

...I daresay you're right, there isn't usually the equivalent volume of available cavities, sufficient to float most boats.
 
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