I need a liferaft, but theyre too expensive

Mat, give Stuart a ring at the weekend, he has a second hand 4 man liferaft for sale. He is in the Norf Sea until the weekend but should be back then. Tel: 07859886431

Pete
 
Too Expensive? Really!!

"According to early reports a 35ft Max Fun 35 - Holligan Five - capsized and sank minutes after its keel snapped off in the early hours of Saturday morning in relatively flat conditions. The other four members of the crew, aged between 18 and 61, managed to fire a distress signal and scramble into a life raft before being rescued"

Ask these guys if they would have swapped their "expensive" liferaft for any of the other suggested 'cheaper' options on this thread! And they were coastal, not far offshore when it happened!

Could they have launched their carefully lashed fully/partially inflated tender in time? (One with an outboard & plenty of fuel to get ashore, as was one suggestion)

Who cares what the RYA/RORC advise or not advise, its your life! When you are in that sort of distress, you would sell your Mother to get one!

If your boat's engine packed up, would you buy the cheapest or the best? Or use a pair of sweeps, cos engines are too bloody expensive?

A liferaft is of more use than your expensive life insurance. Without one, your life & more importantly, the lives of those on your boat who you are responsible for & have trusted you, are in danger.

If in a distress situation, you lost someone, what would your bleat about cost be then? God forbid that someday, a coroner might be asking you why you decided to sail without one!
 
I didn't know the Route du Rhum went up the channel - they must have changed the course.

Yes of course for ocean sailing they will take a different approach - but we are not talking about ocean sailing.

Can you give an appropriate example of where CG are receiving a reliable EPIRB signal in coastal waters when they have not responded immediately?
 
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- even Sky dodyboxes can register as an EPIRB alarm -

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I also find that almost impossible to believe. A full EPIRB signal includes a coded 12 digit number identifying the EPIRB from which that signal comes - and that is almost certainly Grey coded with tons of redundancy.

While it is possible that a Digibox might generate interference in the 406 band the chance of that interference being decoded as a valid EPIRB id is vanishingly small
 
Re: Too Expensive? Really!!

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"Ask these guys if they would have swapped their "expensive" liferaft for any of the other suggested 'cheaper' options on this thread!

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So why won't a £600 secondhand liferaft thats been serviced and in good condition work rather than a new £2000 one? that extra money could be the difference between not carrying one and having one for some folk, including me. Quite happy with my Avon Coastline.
 
Would you rather go to sea in a boat that can sink or one that does not have a gert big lump of iron screwed to the bottom so it can't?
Silly argument of course just as yours is ! There is a very good argument in favour of not having a liferaft if you have a boat like mine that is an unsinkable catamaran with a 12 ft rib on board with a 10 HP motor and remote fuel tank giving 20 mile range. While you are floundering about in your liferaft I will hopefully be motoring to shore. It's only fire that would drive me off the boat even then. How many boats carrying life rafts have totally inadequate fire fighting appliances?
Life rafts on there own are a last ditch option if all else has failed.
I think the RYAs point is exactly that and for channel cruising other things are more important. For an Atlantic crossing however even I would carry one.
On a 26ft monohull that can sink and has no room for an inflated dinghy I think I would carry one anyway. It's horses for courses. Generalisation is daft.
 
While I agree with most of Guapa's comments I think this is a bit OTT and flies in the face of the RYA's recommendations. So arrogant.... perhaps, but well intended.
As far as experience is concerned I have actually been sailing for over 35 years and earned a dubious living during that time designing and building all types of vessel including both commercial craft and some he may have served aboard. This does not mean his opinions (or mine) are right all the time, or that others are wrong.
I also think a liferaft can be a sort of security blanket that stops a lot of people thinking about how to deal with emergencies in other ways just as an EPIRB can.
I think if his statement were modified to say that every skipper who takes his boat to sea should have well thought out emergency plans and have practiced all of them, (including fire drill and MoB) and has thought about the conditions in which he would abandon ship and have the appropriate equipment on board for all emergencies.... I would agree. In some cases this could include a life raft. In others it would not. The only time I ever took to one of these contraptions was off the coast of Cornwall in 1968, never mind why. We were 5 miles off Rame head at the time with an offshore wind and drifted for 8 hours through the night and were nearly run down by coasters twice as the flares in the raft were soaked and didn't work. If I had been in the 12 ft rib I now carry I would have been ashore in 1/2 hour under my own steam..... Generalisations are very dangerous.
 
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12 ft rib on board with a 10 HP motor and remote fuel tank giving 20 mile range. While you are floundering about in your liferaft I will hopefully be motoring to shore. It's only fire that would drive me off the boat even then.

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Precisely my approach after discussion with SWMBO and the eldest child, who might have to be "in charge" in a particualry nasty set of circumstances. A 2.8m rib with 10 HP motor and 12l tank was, in our expectations, quite capable of getting us to shore in our expected cruising areas.

BTW why all the talk of partially inflated inflatables? Don't fancy blowing one up when slishing aorund in the wet stuff.
 
Re: Too Expensive? Really!!

Ask these guys if they would have swapped their "expensive" liferaft for any of the other suggested 'cheaper' options on this thread!


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So why won't a £600 secondhand liferaft thats been serviced and in good condition work rather than a new £2000 one? that extra money could be the difference between not carrying one and having one for some folk, including me. Quite happy with my Avon Coastline
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My argument was not 'high cost v lower cost', but liferaft v no-liferaft.

As an additional question, how many people with liferafts, high or low cost, actually know how to use them? A sea survival course offers some experience, but how many have bothered to even go on one of these?
 
Will you please support this with some evidence? If not, I will assume it to be unreliable (at best). For evidence, I want to see something published by the emergency services not second and third hand anecdotal reports via reporters.

The technology is very reliable.
 
There was a post a while back from someone asking what sort of liferaft they need to sail from Poole to the Solent, a trip that I and many others have sailed in dinghies and paddled in kayaks.

I think the consensus was along the lines of ' None really but if you feel you need one here are some suggestions'

Be nice to see that kind of line here.
 
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Will you please support this with some evidence? If not, I will assume it to be unreliable (at best). For evidence, I want to see something published by the emergency services not second and third hand anecdotal reports via reporters.

The technology is very reliable.

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Personally I would be more inclined to believe the experience of someone who has done the job rather that the official line any day.
 
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While it is possible that a Digibox might generate interference in the 406 band the chance of that interference being decoded as a valid EPIRB id is vanishingly small

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So small that there were at least two recorded incidents last year - and received attention from the national media
 
As I said earlier: the suits will never confirm this on the record for obvious reasons. Speak to anyone doing the actual job and you will find that I'm not wrong.

Analogy: according to the government everyone admitted in A&E gets seen to lin less than 4 hours. Unless of course, if it happens to be you or someone you know.
 
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BTW why all the talk of partially inflated inflatables? Don't fancy blowing one up when slishing aorund in the wet stuff.

[/ QUOTE ]We live aboard and anchor from May to September. Quite often it is far too rough to get into the tender 3.4m RIB 'safely' and we don't go ashore. Other times we can't launch the tender from the stern davits (sugar-scoop stern, far too dangerous) so we lift it alongside with the spinnaker halyard. Once it was so rough at anchor I couldn't safely get the tender up on davits so I left it riding to the kedge anchor, sailed round the headland to a marina and came back two days later to retrieve the tender.

I don't consider a tender as suitable in rough seas and I have been on the verge of being frightened on the tender. Better off clinging to the boat, I reckon, than getting into the tender.

However, if you are sinking or on fire in calm conditions it might be the obvious choice though if more than a couple of miles out I'd launch the liferaft and consider towing that behind me. RIBS are not good in bad conditions.
 
If you are saying that you have first hand experience of this while on duty, will you share the details with us - Who, What, When, Why, Where?
 
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So small that there were at least two recorded incidents last year - and received attention from the national media

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Okay then - post a reference. Without that I simply will not believe that random interference from a digibox could look like a properly coded EPIRB signal
 
But that refers to a 121.5MHz (i.e. PLB) not a 406MHz EPIRB

You would have thought that someone who claims to have umpteen years of professional experience and to have been involved with rescues would know the difference between the two wouldn't you.

For the record I totally agree 121.5MHz is pretty well useless as a way of altering others to distress. This debate is about 406MHz EPIRBs which have been specifically designed to solve the problems with 121.5 PLBs
 
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