A Bit of Instructive Fun

One of the mistaken things we bought last year when getting ready for our cruise to Gibraltar was a liferaft which we got on Ebay. It was out of service and it turned out that the price of getting it serviced was going to be the same as a new one after we had paid £200 for it anyway. The odds of being able to resell it were vanishingly small. Freecycle even failed so we decided to see what happens when you pull the cord!

As ever, I think it is an excellent thing to do this in a controlled manner so you know what to expect if you have to do it for real on a dark and stormy night. Not that we want to be in the position of having to abandon ship on a dark and stormy night.

Two things were interesting:
One is the length of the painter/ripcord though I suspcect that this would be less of an issue when afloat.
The other is that it makes quite a lot of sound with a definite bang when the CO2 cylinder goes off. After that it is all over in less than ten seconds!

I have a rather poor quality video and will get that uploaded somewhere soon. These photos show it. I didn't have time to get a picture of it coming out of the canister between dropping the painter and raising the camera.

And here is the video!
Click Here

First time I have ever posted a video but there you go.