April 19, 2018
Our old liferaft celebrated it’s 26th birthday a while back and that’s just too old. Usually, they can’t be repacked after they get to be about twenty, and they are supposed to be repacked every year. Well, we didn’t quite do that. We had it done before we left six years ago and not since. Time for a new liferaft!
So what does one do with the old liferaft? Try it! That’s what we did, and while it worked, there was a surprise.
The first surprise was that the line was HARD, HARD, HARD to pull. The theory is that you toss the raft overboard in an emergency (not an easy task since it weighs about the same as the moon), and then pull the line that attaches it to the boat until the line activates the inflation mechanism.
So I pulled…
But the line didn’t budge. I pulled harder. It gave a little and then got stuck again. I pulled hard again. It gave a little more. This battle continued for quite some time. I was shocked at how long the line was…
I really don’t know that we would have been able to inflate the raft in a true emergency. I had the advantage of the friction of the grass. If I’d pulled that hard with the canister in the water, it would have just skipped across the waves. I guess we’d have managed but the language involved wouldn’t have been pretty.
Finally, BOOM…
The next surprise was just how small our supposed six person raft was. Here it is with just 3.6 people in it and it was pretty packed. (I was reading the directions, trying to figure out where the guest bedroom was.)
Our new raft is only a four person version instead of our old six person raft. I hope Cyndi doesn’t mind extreme closeness! Wait, I hope we never have occasion to find out just how crowed it is.
It wasn’t all yanking lines and struggling. It was kind of fun and a great learning experience.
-Rich
