Recently, after completing our seven year circum-navigation, we watched our life raft being opened to have it serviced. When the guy carefully unfolded the raft, he found that the glue had started to fail in many places, including the seams holding the two buoyancy rings together and also where the rubber floor joins to the rings. He condemned it as irreparable.

It’s a bit worrying that the life raft would have fallen to pieces if we’d have had to use it in anger. You can just imagine having to abandon ship in a storm; inflating the life raft; throwing in our carefully prepared survival grab bags; stepping into the life raft as our yacht sinks below the waves, only to find the floor peeling loose and the buoyancy rings separating.

The life raft has a 12 year warranty and was manufactured in Aug 2006, so it's within the warranty period, but the company (Survitec) are refusing my warranty claim on the basis that I've not had the life-raft serviced within their recommended schedule. Their sales literature proudly state that the liferaft service period is 3 years, but the small print says that if its used in the tropics then the service period should be every 12 months.

I'm going to write an article on the reliability of inflatable liferafts and I'd be interested to hear of anyone's experiences with servicing and/or failures.

In particular:
1. How often do you have your liferaft serviced?
2. Are you sailing in the tropics?
3. Have you experienced any failures of your life-raft?
4. Manufacturer and Model.

I dare say I may get some back-lash to this post…
I have always thought that if my boat didn’t have a life raft, then I probably wouldn’t buy one – preferring instead to spend the money on other preventative measures. (According to Beth Leonard’s book, about 25% of cruisers opt not to own one…) However, my boat does have one but it is now 2+ years overdue for service. I was not planning to service it again, as last time, even though it passed test, it was looking a little tired. The Pelican box on the coachroof had leaked…
Because I don’t feel that the coachroof is the best place, we decided to remove that (gaining much better forward visibility) and we put the life raft into a non-waterproof box on the transom of Toodle-oo! – very accessible but possibly not the best decision we’ve made – though we considered carefully at the time.

I suspect now, since it’s not been properly protected and is now 11 years old, it’s probably not in very good shape at all. What to do?

In the US, I seem to remember it cost about $500 to service and replace the sundry contents (can’t find the receipt). We’re now in the UK, which does not appear to be a hot-bed for Winslow life rafts, the closest service centre being Guernsey! What to do indeed…?

I will await a response from Guernsey, but I suspect the raft will once again be out of date and found in the transom box, to be used as a complete Hail Mary…


Are there others out there that have opted to not have a life raft - and willing to admit it?

Bill Balme