Testing a JonBuoy

[jimi]

After a last service ten years ago we decided it was time to test the Jonbuoy, IT inflated beatifully and the light wotked great. There was a bit of an issue retreiving it when my glasses fell off and into it. IT really was very heavy and difficult to haul back on board, goodness knows what it would be like with someone in it. Oh, and a word of caution make sure you are the only boat in the lock of the NordZee Kanal when you carry out the test.

 

[prv]

make sure you are the only boat in the lock of the NordZee Kanal when you carry out the test.

Are we to assume the test wasn't entirely pre-planned?

The weight will be the stabilising bag underneath that also stops it being blown away downwind - 40 litres or so of seawater. You'd need to put it on a halyard anyway with a person on board, that's what the webbing ring halfway up the flagpole is for.

I tend to think it's unlikely to be a neat lifting operation like me bringing my tender onto the foredeck in a calm anchorage, though. If the boat's rolling beam-on to the waves, then you can take up the slack halyard as she rolls down towards the buoy, and then it'll be plucked up as the boat rolls back. At that point (at least with my lowish topsides by modern standards) a mobile casualty can probably scramble under the guardrails.

Have you been able to get hold of a new cylinder to re-arm it?

Pete

 

[jimi]

I don't think I'll bother with it. I inherited it with the boat. Yes you are correct, it was'nt preplanned, one could sense the lock keeper's convulsions ;-)

 

[photodog]

Sounds more succesfull than our test....

View attachment 72246

Sank like a stone....

 

[capnsensible]

What type of stone?

 

[Graham_Wright]

SWMBO and I went on a sea survival course. The practical was carried out in an indoor swimming pool At the start of the wet bit, course instructor's husband deployed a JonBuoy.

At the end of the wet bit he had still not managed to enter it.

He said that was the last of many failures.