Lifejackets

[pennycar9]

While doing a liferaft demonstation at our local Marina, a volunteer, who is a helper at the local college involved with maritime studies, was helping out by being in the water and getting into the liferafts ect ect. He was wearing my lifejacket,which is a crewsaver 150 auto inflate. Jumped into the water, lifejacket inflated, as it should have ,and then deflated, as it shouldnt have. Imagine the implications had I been wearing it at sea and the unthinkable happened.

On closer inspection, the non return valve in the oral inflation tube was stuck and so letting the gas out. Even orally inflating the jacket produced the same result.

I service all our lifejackets in the spring each year but my jacket has had to go to the service centre to have a new tube fitted.

In the event no harm was done ,no one hurt, but it goes to show these things are not fool proof.

The moral here is check your LJs on a regular basis!!!!!!

 

[Nick_H]

Blimey, how old was it. That sounds like recall territory to me.

 

[brianrunyard]

Product recall manually inflated Lifejackets

Whilst on the subject of lifejackets.
There's a product recall for some manually inflated ones.
See here

 

[SpiderDiver]

Had a similar experience recently with same type of LJ on a Sea Survival course. Part of course involves getting into liferaft from the pool with inflated LJ. The guys in the water and in the liferaft pushing and pulling managed to launch me rather fast and hard into raft and I must have landed heavily on inflator causing it to fall apart and LJ deflated rapidly. Later on found that the 2 halves of the inflator mechanism where it clamps onto the jacket had just popped apart.

So another thing to check during servicing that it is clipped together firmly - possibly also have spare lifejacket in grab bag too I guess as not easy to repair in liferaft bobbing around.

Maybe this is something I should relay back to Crewsaver as well? I must say overall they are excellent jackets though - have just bought some more as well.

On a related topic there was lots of discussion on the course about manual v auto jackets and conclusion from some people were that manual perhaps best as you are in control and in some circumstances don't want it to inflate as getting back into ribs or onto pontoon difficult. What do the panel think?