It seems that Kirk Ezell and his shipmate on a delivery voyage woke up Christmas day with water ankle deep in the sailboat and rising rapidly, some 200 miles south of Jamaica. The boat was sinking and abandoning ship was their priority now. They apparently had a life raft on board, a good start, and launched it, tossing all their survival gear in the raft. You’ve heard the expression, "look before you leap?" How about, look before you toss all your survival gear in a raft whose floor has disappeared!

Read all about it with links to video coverage: www.equipped.org/blog/?p=102

Any idea on what brand the faulty raft was?

Tom A.

No, lots of square low-end marine rafts out there. Hard to tell from the indistinct images.

It probably was glued construction rather than RF-welded polyurethane coated fabric.

I found someone on Craigslist trying to sell an old Navy life raft that had been sitting in his neighbor's backyard for 12 years. I told him it was no good and if he tried to inflate it he'd better stand back about 50 feet or so because he might end up looking like the Pillsbury Doughboy if the raft burst and blew talcum powder all over the place. Yikes!

There's a good reason they are destroyed rather than surplused.

Tom A.

I'm not sure we can say that without more information. I've seen failures in both type construction and I've seen both last for decades. How it's done is more important, IMO, than the type of construction. Either can be done poorly.

Yes, it always seems the first item on the safety inspection list to be lost is the safety inspection schedule.

Sometimes you get what you pay for, and I'll bet they didn't pay much. Or at least not enough...

Better lucky than smart...I say that routinely at my weekly poker game after a buddy nails his 2-outer on the river.

I am not a boater/sailor, but shouldn't any survival gear stowed away on a boat be buoyant somehow?

Also, I would make sure my secondary means of staying afloat in an emergency got regular inspections.

Don't you love when what should have been a "walk off" evacuation turns bad? A good friend tells the story of his brother, in a similar situation many years ago. Freeying a boat, but the boat was brand new - started sinking in the Caribean - got off their Mayday, deployed the brand new reaft, and the 4 souls stepped off onto raft. Boat went down a few minutes later. They were picked up in a few hours "with no health problems, and a good story"

The story starts with the boat already sinking.

I am curious about the other oversight that got them into trouble in the first place.

Granted probably not the case in this instance, but for me it usually starts with forgetting the drain plug.

Hey, I won lots of money as a young marina-monkey in high-school off those drain-plug deficient owners. Faced with a $250 yank-out and dry fee, I'd offer to empty their boat for forty bucks as long as the spark plugs weren't underwater.

I'd push it out of the slip, jump-start it and then run it balls-out across the lake. Physics would drain the hull as it planed out above the water-line and then I'd stick in the drain plug, return it to the slip and collect my cash.

Yeah, I have drained one that way myself. I finally started hooking the plug to the key chain. No plug, no start. I always make sure it will at least crank BEFORE I get to the ramp.

Watched a 40 footer go down leaving the slip into the channel because the bozo forgot to put the drain plugs back in. Nothing but mast sticking up. Bad news is he made getting out of the marina a lot tougher. I mean, it's hard to steer the boat when your on your back pointing and laughing.

other common failures are the water hoses to the engines for cooling, especially if it has water cooled exhaust.
It might have been a failed bilge pump too.
A lot of these boats leak constantly around things like the prop shaft and it is the bilge pumps that keep them on the surface.

I think it is a good bet that if the life raft was never inspected there would be other items that missed regular inspections too.
Rubber hoses rot.

A lot of these small sail cruisers have through hull fittings installed that are incompatable galvanically. As soon as they are in the salt water the different metals start to corrode each other. This could be as simple as somebody cheaping out and buying a plumbing fitting in a hardware store that is copper or even steel instead of bronze.

Quoting from Wikipedia;
" Galvanic series tables for seawater are commonplace due to the extensive use of metal in shipbuilding. It is possible that corrosion of silver brazing in a salt water pipe might have caused a failure that lead to the USS Thresher sinking with all men lost."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_corrosion

Check you water heater fittings. That is where the cheaping out usually occurs. Won't generally cost you your life, but one heck of a lot of money. This is where I learned about dissimilar metals and galvanic reactions.