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.

Hi Bill,
The Winslow raft guys in Guernsey are great (AB Marine) and right next to the harbor. We had ours done there and participated and learned a great deal from the discussions we had and suggestions they made. Belgium had a re-packing location which we used when we were in Turkey.
I am a fan of Winslow because I believe them to make excellent rafts, but also as they will pack to size. This makes it far easier to then store the raft in a cockpit locker: out of rain, away from sun, away from green water on deck, not able to be swept away in a knock-down and very accessible from a safe location if/when needed (the foredeck is hardly a location one wants to work from in ornery conditions).
So, yes, I think a cockpit locker makes far more sense as a storage location for a raft than any other. Add that to Winslow’s willingness to change the shape when you order it in a valise. We ordered ours packed long and thin so that it just reaches the bottom of our cockpit locker (maybe, from memory, 4 feet x 1 foot by 8 inches): open the cockpit lid and the handles for the raft are right there in front of you and just lift it straight out.
Winslow reports a range of $800-1200 for servicing here in North America, much of the variation is the equipment you choose to have inside (watermaker needs pickling, epirb, batteries in radio, etc.)
I will address whether to carry a raft in a separate post.
My best, Dick Stevenson, s/v Alchemy