the basics for survival?

[SaltyMonkey]

Originally Posted by Tellie

But you certainly would not need a farm, Callahan did survive with one solar still, albeit barely. Thus my suggestion of taking four with you. Easy to pack even six. I played around with two of them a few years ago and it was fairly easy to make two pints or more a day from a single solar still in good to fair conditions. Six solar stills would take up about a gallon to a gallon and a half worth of water space in a ditch bag. They have to be tended to carefully to make that much water, but whatdaya gonna do all day anyways floating around in a life raft?

He had TWO stills and he collected RAIN water

"He collected drinking water from two solar stills and various jury-rigged devices for collecting rainwater, which together produced on average just over a pint of water per day."

He had a hell of a time making them work. Solar stills aren't a long term solution. They will generate a fair amount but you will need MORE than a few pints a day and that is NO guarantee you will get that. I had several and I know this for a fact since I also tested them.

[Tellie]

Actually he packed three. But if you can't get them to work you're right you may need to buy a watermaker.

[hellosailor]

""Oh, it's okay, somebody will rescue me " doesn't sound like much of a plan to me."
I pay someone else to make my electricity. And someone else to make sure aircraft don't land on my roof. And yet another whole agency to make some attempt at keeping the drunks in bars and off the road. And while I keep a constant eye on Vladimir Putin and the Red Chinese, I also pay still more folks to make sure THEY don't try to steal my shoes in the night as well.

So, I pay some agency every year to pick up the phone if I push the Big Red Button. And I remind my CongressCritter from time to time, to Send Money when that agency asks for SAR funding.

If I wanted to really plan a survival kit, Step #1 would be called "Don't go there."

When I need cab, I hail a cab. I don't start mining iron to build a car. I don't even carry the plans for the blast furnace. I just hail the cab, and rely on someone else to make sure there's one around. Which, after all, is the basis for what we call a civilized society. As opposed to ransom nomads passing in the woods from time to time.

What you can carry onboard is way less than a battleship or carrier can. They carry spares and workshops and all sorts of good things, but they still call for help when they need it.

Now, if you can invent a ballasted life raft that also does a good job propelling itself, AND has a shelf life of more than ten years without needing all that repack nonsense and rotting in the box...That I would vote for. Fast.

[SaltyMonkey]

If you can get a hard life raft that is water ballasted and storable/deployable, that would be awesome.

[sabray]

1) Drinking water would be high on my list. So water catchment and a hand desalinating pump. 2) Food is also up on my list. Sabray has a club and some assortment of sharp hook things with colorful attachments. 3)Air which I should have listed first. The only thing that I can think of to aid air are floaty things that help my head be exposed to air. You pick what is best to keep air in your near atmosphere.4) warmth enough so I can maintain a normal body temp. I have space blankets and a few boxes of the larger sized hand warmers. Also hats,thermal liners and fancy bibs with matching jackets.later I would list the epirb flares whistles strobes dsc stuff all which are nice.



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[barnakiel]

- a sat phone,
- an epirb,
- an other epirb,
- AIS MOB beacon,
- handheld DSC VHF,
- red parachute flares, orange smoke,
- protective clothing (heat/cold),
- potable water,
- more potable water,
- even potable more water,
- food that does not call for water to digest.

You want to be found. You want not to perish from heat or cold before they find you. You can live for about a week without drinking, over two weeks without eating.

b.

[SaltyMonkey]

Dinghy | Lifeboat | Yacht Tender | Portland Pudgy

[MBLittle]

Originally Posted by barnakiel

- a sat phone,
- an epirb,
- an other epirb,
- AIS MOB beacon,
- handheld DSC VHF,
- red parachute flares, orange smoke,
- protective clothing (heat/cold),
- potable water,
- more potable water,
- even potable more water,
- food that does not call for water to digest.

You want to be found. You want not to perish from heat or cold before they find you. You can live for about a week without drinking, over two weeks without eating.

b.

A week without water?? Yikes.

The Army always taught me the rule of 3s for extreme situations:

3 minutes without air
3 hours without shelter
3 days without water
3 weeks without food
3 months without WiFi...

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[sabray]

Sucks when a monkey doesn't even mention the club or water in its top 5. I'm thinking like a cave dweller which is PC for duhhh man.


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[SaltyMonkey]

Originally Posted by MBLittle

A week without water?? Yikes.

The Army always taught me the rule of 3s for extreme situations:

3 minutes without air
3 hours without shelter
3 days without water
3 weeks without food
3 months without WiFi...

Sent from my LG-E980 using Cruisers Sailing Forum mobile app

You forget 3 seconds with fear

[colemj]

Originally Posted by Andrew Troup

Great post, Delancey, I reckon.

And an admirable point of view. Great to see the overwhelming majority on this thread seemingly interested in taking some responsibility for their own survival.

Previous discussions had led me to wonder if more people might respond as if this notion was being pushed down their throat, in spite of the use of such markers as "personally" ...

In previous threads there has generally been a much more palpable consumerist ethos of delegation and outsourcing of responsibility for survival.

I personally wish the national authorities would adopt a policy of "if we get an EPIRB signal from leisure craft, we will respond if we have spare capacity". That would certainly refocus people on what measures to take in the way of self reliance.

To rely 100% on being rescued, regardless of where one is or why, smacks to me of "It makes no sense to have fire extinguishers. That's for the fire service to worry about .... and you should have insurance anyway"

Apart from the passivating and infantilising effect on the sailing community, exemplified by those to whom survival has become purely about gadgets, I don't think it's fair on the taxpayer (particularly in small nations with huge rescue areas) for states to accept an open-ended duty of care, and it's particularly galling when nitwits like Jarle Andhoey trade on that duty of care.

All this delegation of responsibility to the state just hastens the day when the states mandate the details of how, when and in what we venture onto the water.

(As a few states already do, or have attempted to do)

I don't understand. Are you proposing that there should be no emergency notification of a vessel in distress or a person clinging to life in a raft, and no response made available anyway? You think the best thing is to be so prepared, that you will float around for up to a year (or more) until your raft drifts onto habitable land? And once there, you will get a job and earn the money for the medical care you will desperately need? After you build yourself a house to live in while doing so?

Or is your problem that technology allows a 3-4 day response from almost every corner of the globe, but you think that takes the fun out of abandoning a boat and prefer to see that response downgraded to 30-40 days?

You think it is admirable that people take responsibility for their own survival only as long as that survival means more than a month (or some other randomly chosen "he-man" time)? And it is a symptom of a selfish and sick society that people take responsibility for their own survival for up to only a week?

How about this for perspective: Technology now allows SAR to pinpoint locations so that the mission costs much less, the rescue can be coordinated with and handed off to the agency/country that is best capable of the job, only necessary equipment is used and the SAR people are better prepared.

In the past, whole swaths of ocean would be fruitlessly searched by multiple agencies/countries at great cost with no idea of the weather or conditions the SAR team might need to operate in.

Your point doesn't make any sense to me.

Mark

[Delancey]

I don't know if I've ever really let myself down, but I can probably think of hundreds if not thousands of occasions in my life where I have been let down by other people or broken equipment.

EPIRBs can and do fail. It's a fact.

The problem is there is no way of knowing at what rate. If someone depends on an EPIRB for rescue but fails to make other sensible preparations we might not ever know about it, it's called lost at sea.

Moreover, while the USCG and NOAA require registration on activation, they don't require notification when that device is abandoned, so there is no way of knowing what the fail rate really is.

One thing the USCG does require is that boats that are required to carry an EPIRB are also required to test it on a monthly basis to confirm it is operational and to maintain a log of those tests.

Why would these tests be required if the device itself was not perceived as being inherently fallible?

So given the knowledge that this device can fail why would anyone specifically NOT prepare for this possible eventuality?

MaineSail gives has provided an example of an EPIRB toasted by lighting. Your boat could have taken a strike while sitting at the dock and you don't even know about it because you don't test it monthly. Next time you are out on the water good luck pushing a button.

Are you aware there is a recall due to a faulty chip in a GME EPIRB that was for sale from 2005 - 2010? What do you think the unnamed protagonist in Fight Club would say about other brands?

Do you know that if you have a battery replaced you have to re-register it if you get it back and the hex code doesn't match?

In light of these concerns is it too much to pack a bag to grab on your way out that might make life on a death raft a little more comfortable for a period longer than four days? Just in case? Is that too much bother? Really?

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wIdmkETuWeM

[Mark1977]

Originally Posted by SaltyMonkey

Dinghy | Lifeboat | Yacht Tender | Portland Pudgy

Oh I love these...but out of my price range for a dinghy.

[colemj]

Ah, yours is a different argument. There is nothing wrong with preparing for the worst.

I was taking umbrage at the other poster's rant unrelated to preparedness and more on the nanny-state and about how epirbs are a weakness and are bad for the community and society.

One can both be prepared and take advantage of available technology. In fact, one can combine them and make reasonable risk assessments using probability analysis.

Too often here, probability is ignored and things spiral into "end times" fears.

So you lost your epirb and are now in your portland pudgy in the Atlantic in June. You will be there for several months now, so you will experience hurricanes - so what is your plan for surviving a hurricane in your lifeboat? That plastic coated canopy will rot out in a month if it hasn't already been torn off from taking a roll, so you have replaced it in advance with a heavy-duty frame and awning sunbrella?

See how easy it is to carry things so far?

Mark

[colemj]

As for epirb registration, batteries, etc, it is the owner's responsibility to undertake all maintenance, repairs, testings, et. This is no different than any other piece of gear on board.

I'll bet you more liferafts fail when called upon than epirbs. And I will bet you there are more liferafts out there past their inspection dates than there are epirbs. Why isn't this thread concerned about liferaft failures?

And let's go to recent statistics - how many people have been rescued in the past 20yrs after floating around for months in a liferaft while SAR conducts ocean-spanning searches, compared to rescues that have been immediately conducted due to epirb activation? The answer reflects both probability and reliability.

A missing boat or person has no bearing on this debate. If one falls overboard, it does not matter how well prepared the liferaft and ditch bag is. Same for when one's boat sinks out from under one immediately and catastrophically. You cannot assign a favored cause to a mystery to make your point.

Mark