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 Hasbun,
Yes, you remind me: I know of a number of failures at servicing because of water intrusion. This is a hard one as so many installations are fairly exposed, especially to offshore conditions, and, clearly, the enclosures seem to sometimes fail to keep the predictable green water from getting inside. Add to that, the impossibility of knowing whether there is water intrusion until servicing and you are left with significant uncertainty as to the viability of your raft.
I would want my raft maker to guarantee water-tight integrity for immersion as, most any offshore boat will occasionally have their deck immersed in streaming water.
Does anyone know whether raft manufacturers speak to this issue?
My best, Dick Stevenson, s/v Alchemy