Survival at the Gam

Vero Beach

NoLL


After the keynote speech, the best attended seminars at the gam had to do with survival. The first was about life rafts, and the second was entitled "Offshore Survival Techniques." Somebody might say that the cruisers at the gam were all technogeeks judging by the interest. I think that a better interpretation was that they were all truly interested in safety, and that they were thirsty for hard information.


I went first to the life raft seminar. What did I learn? Wow. There is so much I don't know about my life raft. There is so much to think about before using it; things that I never gave much thought to before.

Before using the raft we need to learn to deploy it safely, how to get in and out, and what to put in the raft with us. We keep a ditch kit (a bag of important things to grab if we had to abandon ship). To show how inadequate that is, I learned at the seminar that the number one life threat in the raft if hypothermia; yet I had not thought to include any clothing in our ditch kit plans. Boy oh boy are we mentally unprepared for ditching.


Perhaps most important, I learned that my existing 6 person life raft might be useless. It sat in a canister on Tarwathie's deck since we bought the boat. There is a placard on the canister that says it was last inspected in 2001. It is a Switlick brand raft, and Switlick requires that the raft be inspected yearly at one of their inspection stations. Without inspection, and sitting in the canister, the raft deteriorates rapidly. It could fall to pieces if we ever tried to use it in an emergency.

That's a very big deal. The last time I checked in 2005, the inspection fee was $850. It's probably over $1000 today. To inspect it yearly for 10 years, costs as much as buying a new one.








We can't justify so much money and trouble to inspect the raft every year. I'd rather remove it from the boat, perhaps sell it on EBAY if it is worth anything.


When do you need a life raft? Anytime you're beyond swimming distance from land is one answer. In my book though, it is when you are doing an ocean crossing.


The big thing to remember is that a Westsail 32 is hard to sink. I know her so well now that I'm confident that I could locate any major leak within 15 minutes. It is also likely that I could slow or stop water coming in once I found the problem. We also have the dinghy as a kind of poor man's life raft in case we really need it.


Suppose we did sink in the Gulf Stream 200 miles from land. We have an EPIRB with GPS. Activating the EPRIB should bring a rescue within hours (unless something goes wrong and rescue never comes). We should be able to survive in the dinghy or just with our type 1 life jackets for two hours. The additional safety that a life raft brings would be to allow us to survive for days or weeks until rescued. Unless we were 5000 miles from the nearest land, I think the likelihood of us benefiting from that increment of safety is very small.

In the second survival seminar, the most memorable thing I learned was that most people who abandon ship do so needlessly -- their boats don't really sink after all. That's a very very very important thing to keep in mind.

If you think I'm nuts, feel free to comment or to email me.