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.