Liferafts – the most expensive duffel bag I will ever have

Allow me to bemoan a little – it stinks to pay so much money for something that you hope to never use, that will use up precious space, and that has an ongoing maintenance cost because it needs to be checked and repacked every once in a while.  Damn.

Why bother, then?  We did not carry a liferaft on any of our west coast forays, nor into Mexico.  Why now?

For me, it seems prudent.  We’ve chosen a boat that falls squarely into a “cruiser – racer” category – it’s fast, pretty strong, but it is not built like a tank.  Given statistics like the number of containers that fall off of container ships (if you are wondering, this story cited 10,000 – every year!) and knowledge of how much pollution is getting thrown into our oceans, we actually feel like there is a risk of potentially running into something while offshore.  Couple that with the likelihood that we should go much faster on this boat than on previous boats we have owned (except the 49er), and we’re in a potential “running with scissors” scenario. I’m also a big fan of whales, and while I would never steer the boat towards them, I suspect they know their peeps well and might come over to say ‘ello (and we’d hope that they’d be gentle giants, but we’ve all inadvertently smashed ant hills without realizing it…).  I’m actually less concerned about storm scenarios, but there are those, too.  So, all those reasons seem compelling to just be prepared and buy the damn liferaft.  Damn.

Given the decision to buy the liferaft, we then had to figure out logistics – where would it go?  We wanted to stow the raft in the cockpit in a hard container, but ran out of luck with sizes that would fit in our budget.  Our current plan is to keep it handy in the quarterberth, along with our ditch bag (packed full of astronaut ice cream and slim jims, of course, so we can chum for fish).

For three weeks, we have been researching liferafts – and there are so many choices.  Sadly, we had discovered that in the UK, liferafts are CHEAP…and then found out that if you ship a liferaft, it becomes exorbitantly EXPENSIVE.  So, we focused back on options we could get in the good ol’ USA.  We ended up deciding that if we were going to fork over an arm and a leg on an expensive duffel that we might as well make sure that it meets requirements for some of the double-handed offshore races we would like to do someday (Pacific Cup, Bermuda One-Two).  In the end, we decided on the Viking RescYou 4-person in a valise – reasonable reviews, moderately-priced, and it will be able to meet the racing standards (ISO 9650 Part 1 certified and ISAF approved).  This model comes with a whistle, in case you get bored.

We placed the order and were promptly notified that the liferaft will not ship out until mid-June, as it is currently en route to the US from Denmark (hence the “Viking” name, eh?).  So, with luck, it will arrive by the end of June, before our planned departure at the beginning of July.

Damn liferaft.  I hope never to sing your praises.

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