Frances Howorth - The Grab Bag Book: Your Ultimate Guide to Liferaft Survival

THE GRAB BAG BOOK

and protection

APPENDIX

Common yachting folklore warns us all against thinking about a disaster at sea on the basis that if you do, it is sure to happen. But as the skipper of a yacht you must be prepared for every eventuality and it is your duty to make sure all your crew are too.

This book is all about:

Surviving the disaster of abandoning ship.

Being mentally and physically prepared for the sailors ultimate nightmare.

Why you need to supplement the equipment found inside your liferaft.

Selecting equipment for your grab bag.

It is NOT about:

The particular brand of liferaft or EPIRB you should buy.

Dealing with the accident or emergency that caused the disaster.

It is written for:

Skipper and crew aboard any private vessel.

Any size or type of boat.

Any voyage from across the bay to around the world.

As a responsible skipper, part of the planning for a passage includes ensuring the correct safety equipment is carried aboard your yacht. It is not easy to part with hard earned money for an item of equipment that you doubt will be used, and may even be thrown away after a few years still unopened. It is easy to cut corners at the purchasing stage and buy only the barest minimum. Sadly, when the unimaginable catastrophe happens it will probably be too late to go back and purchase that safety item you previously rejected as an unnecessary expense.

The danger is greater the further you go offshore, because of the higher risk of being at sea in rough weather, but at least you cannot run aground in the middle of an ocean. A shipwreck, however, can happen anywhere, at any time, through no ones fault. If you do have to take to your liferaft, what can you do to improve your chances of being rescued, without injury or loss of life? Read this book at your passage-planning stage to decide what to select for your emergency bag and store this book in your grab bag so you will have it with you in the liferaft.

The importance of training cannot be emphasised enough. This book should be read by every crewmember, re-read regularly, and used for training exercises. Research has shown that at the moment when disaster strikes 75 per cent of people will be stunned and bewildered. Those who have been trained to expect and to cope with such situations will fall back on well-learned patterns of behaviour. A trained crew will work together to leave the yacht safely, carrying with them the maximum equipment to aid their survival.

It is vital that the skipper demonstrates strong leadership and appropriate action both before and after abandonment. It would be nice to think that once you are safely aboard your liferaft, your worst troubles are over and you will be rescued almost immediately. With modern communications, help may be on its way, but you still have to survive until it arrives. What is already packed inside your liferaft and what you additionally take with you are your keys to survival.

Remember: no one is a survivor until they have been rescued or have reached safety by their own efforts.

Horror stories about the survival gear found in liferafts abound. Its not just a question of the lack of equipment or the missing items, but also the quality of the supplies. Even in the best of liferafts the supplies included are limited. It all comes down to money and weight: the more supplies that are packed with a liferaft, the heavier it is, the larger the outer container needed and the more expensive it becomes. Most rafts for the leisure market are sold with a choice of packs, with the most basic and cheapest being a selection of simple items to maintain the raft and not necessarily of high quality. Pray you never have to survive for long with just a basic pack.

Even in the best situation for abandoning ship, when you have a little time, these precious minutes are far more likely to be spent trying to save your yacht rather than choosing what to take with you.

You are unlikely to be in the best frame of mind to make sensible decisions, nor will you necessarily have the equipment that will aid you best in a liferaft, unless you have thought about it while alongside and were able to go shopping.

Your grab bag should contain everything essential to your survival in a liferaft. If you do not have a liferaft and propose to use your dinghy in an emergency, it is even more important to have some form of abandon ship bag, as your dinghy is unlikely to have even the most basic of emergency supplies.

No two situations are ever the same, but if a yacht is sinking there is one overriding priority: the saving of life. It is too late at this point to discover that the liferaft is out of date for a service, the EPIRB is registered in the name of another yacht and the spare flares were landed last weekend.

Good seamanship, knowledge and common sense will help ensure safety at sea. With planning and forethought many a disaster can be prevented, but sadly not all. The training needed by you and your crew, together with the equipment you choose for your yacht depends, to a large extent, on the areas in which you sail or plan to sail, the weather conditions you are likely to encounter and, to a much lesser extent, upon the size of your yacht. A large yacht may need more of, or a larger size of, some equipment than her smaller sister, but most of the items will be identical if they are sailing in the same areas.

When replacing VHF radios, ensure that they are GMDSS compliant.

Since 1999, when GMDSS (Global Maritime Distress and Safety System) became worldwide, going to sea has been much safer. It is now much more likely that a yacht in distress will receive assistance and that time spent by crew in a liferaft will be much shorter. You are much more likely to be hours, rather than days, awaiting rescue. No longer does a lack of VHF contact before abandoning ship mean your chance of rescue in a remote area is minimal.

GMDSS is primarily a vessel-to-shore signalling system, where a vessel in distress can alert a land-based Rescue Co-ordination Centre (RCC), which then co-ordinates the rescue. It is an international system using terrestrial and satellite technology together with shipboard radio systems, ensuring that vessels can communicate wherever they are in the world with shore stations and other ships. The equipment does not require specialist radio operators, and an important part of the system is the automatic way in which it transmits and receives distress alerts, either using conventional radio or the Inmarsat satellite system. GMDSS is not just for emergency and distress messages; it is also used for Urgency broadcasts and routine ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore communications.

GMDSS is not simply a more expensive radio that calls and listens on designated frequencies and saves the authorities from listening out on special distress frequencies: it is a complete system with several elements, including satellite communication, weather and navigation information, and VHF, MF and HF radiotelephony. It also embraces secondary distress signalling devices, which include Search And Rescue Transponders (SARTs) and Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons (EPIRBs).