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I've been designing something just like this in my spare time. Switlik has already done exactly what I had in mind. Check this puppy out. It's a solo liferaft that you can wear in a harness similar to how you wear a pfd. For the cold waters of the NW USA coast a PFD is generally just so that the coast guard can find your body. This puppy might give the MOB quite a bit of time.
Interesting idea. I wonder how much heat loss there would still be. Looks like it would deploy with some water inside, and a single layer of plastic between your body and the cold water of the Salish Sea. Survival might be better (but not visibility from the air) in a gumby suit.
Edit: However, upon reading the link, they do provide a bailer.
I agree that in cold water the increased suvivability would likely be rather limited. Might not be bad in warmer water though, given the CG stays low. Nice that it would provide shade and some protection from spay.
On the cold-water survivability I think that it would actually extend it a lot. If you zip it up tight, I would expect that you'd be shipping some water from time to time, but you would be isolated from the water by fabric, sitting in a small puddle of it, just as you would be if 4 of you were in a 4person standard liferaft.
It's the constantly flowing water that kills the MOB as the body never gets a chance to warm the water close to it because it flows away and is replaced with more cold water. Remember, a diver in a wetsuit is constantly wet but the suit restricts flow of the water around him. The MOB would be wet (but wearing foulies) and I think he'd be pretty warm and wet in those foulies as long as didn't constantly have cold water flowing all around him (if he were swimming IN the water).
I think cold water survival time would be significantly extended over a PFD. Remember also that hypothermia quickly makes it impossible for the MOB to keep their head out of the water (even with the 4"-6" freeboard a PFD allows) and they drown. I would expect that you could be quite hypothermic in this little raft and still be keeping your airway out of the water.
I would also agree that a gumby suit might be better, but I don't think that's an apples to apples comparison. This thing can be worn instead of, or with, a PFD. You can't easily be carrying around a gumby suit all day on deck. The're just too big and bulky.
If you FALL OVERBOARD at night in the Oregon offshore race, for example, you won't have a gumby suit in your hand when you go over. I think you'd stand a much better chance in this thing than with a standard PFD. With a PFD you're toast in under an hour. With this raft, I expect you'd have several hours, if not even a day or two. Long enough for your boat, or the CG to have a fighting chance to come get you. With FLIR the coastguard would spot you in this thing pretty quick I would think.
I wonder how this "raft" will behave with a big sea running and it's blowing 60 knots? If you get tumbled while zipped up in this contraption it might be hard to recover. I wonder if they have any real world testing of how it performs at sea.
Probably not great is what I'm thinking, but then again, is it better than a PFD for the same situation?? Keeping your head above water with 4" of freeboard wouldn't be easy in the above situation either.
I saw a raft pretty much exactly like this one once (in green) on Ebay. The raft was a military surplus pilot's raft for when the eject. The military usually puts some "real world" testing into things like this. On the other hand, like any fabric raft, I'd say it ain't perfect but it usually beats the next best option....
I wonder if the shark would remove the wrapper before eating the contents
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