Questions About Safety Equipment
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Portland Pudgy Tender and Liferaft Combo
Life Raft
Survival Suits
Portland Pudgy Tender and Liferaft Combo (09/2009)
Question: What are your views on the Portland Pudgy as a "proactive" life raft?
Answer: No question, this is an innovative and fascinating boat. Keep in mind that I have never actually seen one, but here are my thoughts:
- One of the advantages that the web site pitches is that it is a “proactive lifeboat” because you can sail or row to the shipping lanes or land. Nice in theory and certainly an admirable idea, but with the availability of 406 MHz EPIRBs at a relatively reasonable cost, which take much of the search out of search and rescue, I’m not sure that this is that big a benefit these days. (See this post for our liferaft of choice.)
- I would worry about the ability of a tired and seasick middle aged couple to deploy this relatively heavy boat off a pitching deck in an emergency. (We are concerned enough about this potential problem that on Morgan’s Cloud we have fitted the bottom life line aft near the liferaft mounting position with a pelican hook to allow us to disconnect the line and slide the raft over the side under the top lifeline without the need to lift it.)
- I would also be concerned about the difficulty of getting into the boat from the water, even with the optional ladder kit, and the danger of getting banged up by the hard shell boat in the process. (Some years ago we did a survival course and were amazed by how difficult it was to enter a liferaft from the water, and this a raft that is intrinsically more stable than a boat. Also, the raft was fitted with an inflated boarding ramp and ladder.)
- As far as I can see from the web site, the Pudgy does not have any water ballast or other system (other than a sea anchor) to stop it from being flipped in large breaking waves. As was graphically and tragically demonstrated in the 79 Fastnet disaster, it is vital that a liferaft have some effective method of reducing the chance of being flipped. Having said that, a Pudgy lying to a sea anchor might be surprisingly seaworthy. I would just like to see more data on this.
- As far as I can see from the web site, in a
life boat situation the Pudgy is going to be very cramped for two and
untenable for more.
In summary, based on a quick look at the Pudgy web site, I would not consider this boat as a substitute for a proper liferaft. However, if personal testing showed its ability as a tender met my needs, I might consider buying one to get both a tender and a backup to the liferaft, but only if it was price competitive with other hard dinghy alternatives and it performed as well. In other words, for me, its liferaft features would not justify a cost increase or performance decrease over a nice hard dinghy like the Fatty Knees. (I have not done a price comparison; the Pudgy may be the cheaper alternative.) Finally, I’m always a bit skeptical of any piece of gear that tries to meet several needs rather than focusing on doing one thing well.
Incidentally, all this is an academic exercise since Phyllis and I strongly believe that the deck should be as clear as possible before going to sea, particularly in the high latitudes, and therefore we are not in the market for a hard dinghy, or even a RIB, as a tender.
(For an interesting analysis, see this post at Boat Bits.)
Manufacturer Comment:
David Hulbert, founder and president of the company that makes the Portland Pudgy in Portland, Maine, e-mailed us this well reasoned and detailed response. We don't agree with some of his points, and we stick by some of ours, but much of what he writes has caused us to rethink. Even in areas where we continue to disagree with David, we are not necessarily right and him wrong, particularly since, as we said before in our first post on the subject, we have never even seen a Pudgy. Also, one of the things that makes this business of ocean voyaging so interesting is that there are a lot of different ways to do it in an efficient and safe manner.
Here are David's comments in their entirety and unedited so that you, our readers, can make up your own minds:
Proactive lifeboat vs. relying on your EPIRB and waiting for rescue: The EPIRB is a great invention, no question, and every blue water sailor should have one. However, they’re easy to lose, and if you have one, it must work, and the battery must be charged. It’s also very important to recognize that in many parts of the world, search and rescue is simply not available. In the proactive Portland Pudgy, you can sail to safety. Many experts on survival at sea emphasize that this is critically important. As Steve Callahan, who spent 76 days adrift on a liferaft, points out, “Most of a long survival voyage is spent drifting slowly in moderate weather.” He goes on to say that if he had had a “dynamic” (i.e. proactive) liferaft/boat, he “would have sailed to safety in a mere six or seven days” (from The Liferaft, Don’t Leave Your Ship Without It).
Ease/difficulty of deploying Portland Pudgy or lifeboat: The Portland Pudgy, a rugged, solid boat, is heavier than most liferaft canisters. However, if you have your Pudgy set up on your deck so that it is easily accessible, and if you fit the life line with a pelican hook so that you can disconnect the line and slide the Pudgy off the deck, it can be easily deployed in an emergency. Bear in mind the old adage that you should not board your lifeboat (or liferaft) until you have to step up to it from your mother boat. You will not be lifting the Pudgy and throwing it down into the water as much as sliding it into the water. With regard to deploying liferafts—unfortunately, there are many tragic stories of liferafts being deployed and not inflating. The Pudgy is already a boat; you don’t have to hope that it inflates. Another difficulty in deploying liferafts is that in severe storm conditions they have been known to become airborne and flip upside down.
Ease/difficulty of getting into the Portland Pudgy from the water: Inflatable liferafts are notoriously difficult to get into. There are many stories of heavy people or people with poor upper body strength being unable to board. The Portland Pudgy is easier to get into from the water than a liferaft is. When you board the Portland Pudgy from the water, even without the boarding ladder, the procedure is as follows: you get in position on the side of the boat at the exposure canopy entrance, holding onto a grabline or the gunwale. Tip the boat toward you so that you can reach in and grab a hand-hold in the middle seat (the hand-holds in the middle seat allow it to function as a horizontal ladder). Kick out and pull yourself in over the gunwale. The boat tips down as you do this, but it will not capsize. One of our testers, a woman in her late fifties with a damaged, weakened shoulder, was sure that she would be unable to get in from the water, and was amazed at how easy it was. We had another tester who weighed 275 pounds climb in from the side easily, without causing the Pudgy to ship water or capsize. The boarding ladder makes it even easier: it acts somewhat like a stirrup that gives you “a leg up.”
Ballast bags/sea anchor/risk of capsize:
- Ballast bags. Ballast bags on liferafts are not as effective as many sailors assume, for the following reason: there is no resistance to a bag of water when it is in the water because it weighs the same as the surrounding water. You only get resistance when the bag is lifted out of the water, and by the time this happens, the liferaft is already tipped very steeply and can be capsized easily by wind or waves. The USCG did a test of liferafts in hurricane force winds (created using helicopters and a C130 airplane). They tested several large liferafts, and all of them, with the exception of the 25-person Givens buoy liferaft, were quickly and easily capsized, potentially trapping the occupants under the collapsing floor of the raft. Somewhere in cyberspace there is a video showing about eight liferafts in the test, and all but one of them flipping. Here’s a link I found to a much shorter excerpt showing just the Givens and another liferaft.
- Sea anchor. The sea anchors that come with most liferafts are notoriously flimsy and inadequate. The Pudgy uses a substantial and ruggedly built Fiorentino sea anchor, made especially for the Portland Pudgy. The sea anchor attaches to the Pudgy’s rugged bridle, which in turn is hooked to two attachment points that are spaced on either side of the bow, for triangulation. The stainless steel attachment points are very solid and cannot tear off (as is possible on fabric liferafts). A Dutch crew from the magazine Zeilen tested the Portland Pudgy as a lifeboat last year in the treacherous waters of the North Sea, and they make it a point in their article to talk about how pleased they were with the performance of the Pudgy with the sea anchor. The bow held firmly into the oncoming waves and wind, thus greatly reducing the risk of capsize. You can see the article here (It’s in Dutch but the photos are great.) Zack Smith of Fiorentino Para-Anchor also tested the Pudgy with its sea anchor in 12 foot seas and dangerous currents off the California coast, and was very happy with its performance.
- Risk of capsize. All boats and liferafts can capsize. When most liferafts capsize, the occupants can be trapped under the floor of the raft. It is necessary for passengers to exit the raft to turn it over. The Portland Pudgy is a solid boat that is heavier than its exposure canopy. The bottom-heaviness makes the Pudgy want to right itself. The CO2-inflated 6-inch tubes of the Pudgy act as roll bars in rough seas. If the Pudgy capsizes with two adults inside and the inflated exposure canopy in place, the added 400 pounds of buoyancy in the canopy make the Pudgy lie partially on its side; the passengers can right the boat by shifting their weight or waiting for wave action to right it. Even lying partially on its side, because of the deep rigid floor of the Pudgy, a large domed air chamber is formed inside the partially capsized boat.
By the way, even without the exposure canopy in place, the capsized Pudgy floats high in the water and is very easy to right using the handholds in the keel, and because of the thickness of the double-wall hull, it picks up little or no water (no sitting in a swamped boat!). This can be life-saving. Hypothermia is a major cause of death in emergencies at sea.
Comfort/Space: The Pudgy has 16.1 square feet of floor space. The USCG requires 16 square feet for a four person liferaft. The Portland Pudgy’s middle seat is removable, and the flat floor is 6 feet two inches long, designed so that two people can comfortably stretch out to sleep. Unlike a liferaft, the Pudgy’s floor can be kept dry. Sitting and lying in salt water for prolonged periods can cause serious sores. Because of the double wall thickness and the foam under the floor, the floor is not cold as in many liferafts, and you can’t feel things like shark fins and fish bumping up against the floor.
Portland Pudgy as a Tender: The Portland Pudgy is an exceptional tender. It’s a 7 foot 8 inch dinghy approved by the USCG for 4 people (twice the capacity of any other 8 foot dinghy). It's stable, safe, and rugged and has huge carrying capacity. One Pudgy owner, cruising off Newfoundland this past winter, credits his Portland Pudgy with saving his big boat when it ran aground: "because it rows so well in rough weather and can handle two 45 pound anchors being dropped in it for kedging off a reef. It is a real workboat built for real world conditions…In the sailing we do a dinghy can mean the difference between life or death, and this isn't in reference to the lifeboat abilities of the pudgy just its stability and durability." It rows beautifully—because of the long skeg it tracks perfectly, and it skims along because it's so buoyant. It's a fun sailing dinghy. We have improved the sailing rig so it's faster and comes into the wind better. If you were to buy a tender such as a Fatty Knees and a decent liferaft, it would cost you more than the Portland Pudgy with its survival gear.
To sum up: the Portland Pudgy is different from a liferaft in two major ways. First of all, it is not made of inflated fabric tubes and cloth. It’s a boat, made of the same rigid, rugged polyethylene that heavy-duty ocean kayaks are made of, and cannot deflate or be punctured by a fish hook or shark fin. This material is intrinsically buoyant. The area under the floor of the cockpit is filled with closed cell foam. The large, watertight, air-filled storage compartments in the hull give added buoyancy. The USCG rates it at 1255 pounds of buoyancy. (This means it took 1255 pounds to submerge it, in a test.) It doesn’t need to inflate and it can’t deflate or sink.
Second, the Portland Pudgy concept respects the abilities and responsibilities of the sailor to protect himself and his crew. The Pudgy is proactive: you can sail, row, or motor it. It is carefully engineered to make it a tough, rugged boat that handles well and incorporates many safety features. All of the survival gear, including sailing rig, sea anchor, exposure canopy, oars, ditch bag, provisions, and fishing gear can stow inside the storage chamber of the double hull (with the exception of the rudder and leeboards, which stow under the stern seat). It has a dash-mounted, built-in compass.
The passive liferaft seems to encourage people to passively trust that the raft will inflate and stay inflated, and that help will come, when unfortunately, too often this has proved not to be the case. The Portland Pudgy is a new concept that is actually related to a very old concept (after all, Captain Bligh and Shackleton used proactive lifeboats in their epic journeys). It challenges many of the assumptions we have grown accustomed to about liferafts. Liferafts have saved many lives, but tragically, many liferafts have failed, and sailors should do some hard thinking about what their options are in protecting themselves, their loved ones, and their crew.
Reader Comments:
Matthew writes [edited for brevity]:
For a cruising monohull yacht, especially one where deck space is rather limited, I can see the appeal of a lifeboat like the Pudgy. Conceptually, it seems similar to the main tenders fitted to many cruise ships: something seaworthy enough to use as a lifeboat, yet versatile enough to be launched every second day for tender duty.
I'm not an offshore sailor, my home turf is freshwater, and all within sight of shore, so take my comments with a suitable lump of salt:
- An EPIRB is a useful tool, but I would never trust my boat or my life to one. They usually summon help, but that help might not come right away.
- Everything I've read/been told about "blue water" seamanship says that on a monohull, you only launch the liferaft if: (a) The mother ship is on fire, (b) The mother ship is going down. For a multihull, fire seems to be the main reason to launch a raft, as a well-designed multi should remain somewhat habitable even if it flips and partly breaks up.
- For either mothership type, it's obvious that the raft must be easy to launch, quickly—and I don't see how the Pudgy would be any harder to launch than a normal raft (which you have to flip right-side-up once inflated half of the time).
- The Pudgy seems a bit small for my tastes; it's half the size of my runabout, which is itself a pretty cramped boat for more than 5 people. But if it were much larger, it would need davits or a crane.
Don writes [edited for brevity]:
When I decided to start going further offshore on my sailing expeditions, I bought a four-man liferaft. Eventually three things happened:
- I realized that the cost of constant repacks was horrendous and unless I actually watched the repack, it could not be trusted.
- I realized that the "safety" offered by the liferaft was questionable at best: It may not inflate, it may fall apart, it may be punctured, my flares will probably put a hole in it (hand-held flares and an inflatable?), it may be blown away by a gust of wind, etc.
- My EPIRB battery will last 48 hours if I am very lucky. After that, they try to figure out where I drifted (good luck with that).
Enter the Portland Pudgy. Now there is something that can carry a lot of gear, in an unsinkable, undeflatable platform. It rows and sails as well. I can do something to effect my own rescue. Added to this is the fact that I can hook myself in for the really rough seas that may capsize me, and since it is my primary dinghy I will be very familiar with its use. I will have launched and rigged it many times. I will be comfortable with the process (unlike a liferaft I may have never even seen).
Martin writes [edited for brevity]:
When I think heavy weather, I think 45kt and above winds and green water over the deck. I have read of several instances where objects tied on deck (including rafts, dinghies) were washed away or damaged by boarding waves or knockdowns. That is a major concern with a Pudgy (or hard dinghy) on a sub-50ft yacht.
I am somehow not very comfortable with a life-and-death emergency product
that I cannot test when I want to (e.g. liferaft). Even an EPIRB has a
self-test feature. So I really favour a liferaft product that is stowable
but that I can test and re-stow whenever I choose to. It just seems such
a basic, reasonable requirement.
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Life Raft (04/2008)
Question: What sort of life raft do you have on Morgan’s Cloud?
Answer: We have a RFD Beaufort 6-person commercial SOLAS raft.
The advantage of this raft is that Revere and RFD Beaufort are partners in it: Revere in the USA and RFD Beaufort for the rest of the world. Or at least that seems to be how it works, although you can buy a RFD Beaufort in the USA too. Anyway, this means that you can get these rafts serviced at any of some 300 RFD Beaufort service stations anywhere in the world as well as at Revere stations in the USA. For example, there are 23 service depots in Norway.
Contrast that to many of the American-built rafts from companies like Switlik, Winslow or Givens that can only be serviced in major yachting centers. This is not a trivial issue if you plan to sail to out-of-the-way places, as we found to our cost when we had to ship our old Givens to the UK from Norway to get it serviced—the shipping cost twice what the service did.
Having said that, I’m not sure that the RFD Beaufort
is as good a raft as the top of the line offerings from the above companies.
It was certainly a lot cheaper, even though we opted for a commercial quality
raft that is SOLAS certified. However, we are comfortable with the RFD
because, in our opinion, the most likely scenarios which would force us
into the raft are fire or flooding, not extreme weather. Frankly, we think
it unlikely that we would make it into the raft alive in a storm strong
enough to overwhelm Morgan’s Cloud, so whether or not the RFD
is the ultimate storm survival raft is academic to us.
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Survival Suits (2007)
Question: Do you carry survival suits and do you do anything special for working in the dinghy? I’ve seen ice suits, and all sorts of combo work/survival suits and we are wondering if we should carry something similar for the wilder areas?
Answer: Our thinking is that survival and exposure suits have very different, although overlapping, functions and that both should be carried for cold water offshore sailing.
Let’s start
with survival (immersion) suits. We carry one for each crew member and
the facts are compelling:
- Every fishing boat and commercial vessel operating in cold water has them.
- There are recorded incidences of people surviving two to three days fully immersed in near freezing water when wearing them.
- If you have to abandon ship in the high latitudes without one you will likely last less than 30 minutes in the water and less than 12 hours in a life raft or small boat.
- Two years ago a yacht with two people aboard was abandoned just south of Iceland in July. There was one survival suit aboard and one survivor.
If you have survival suits aboard, it is important to practice donning them since it is harder than it looks. You should also know how to enter the water, right a life raft from an inverted position and enter it, all with the suit on. We did a course—the same one commercial fishermen take—with the Norwegian rescue service some years ago and learned all this, together with more esoteric things like how to exit from the wheelhouse of an inverted fishing boat with a suit on. It took just two hours in a pool and was well worth it. After the course I could see many places where a small mistake by a mariner without training could be fatal. The instructor is a personal friend and the captain of a Norwegian rescue boat that covers the Barents Sea out as far as Bear Island, and he says that going to sea in the north without them is just not a good idea. (Actually, what Knut would say about people that go to sea in the north without survival suits is not printable.)
However,
survival suits are listed at US$500 to $600 (see picture top right), making
the thought of equipping a boat with enough suits for the whole crew more
than a little daunting. But don’t give up on the idea; they can be had
at very large discounts, particularly from outfits that supply fishermen.
For example, Hamilton Marine in Maine, USA (www.hamiltonmarine.com)
is selling the Sterns survival suit for US$260.00 (see picture middle right).
These are the suits we carry on Morgan’s
Cloud.
At that price they are well worth considering, even for a boat that is not planning to sail in the high latitudes, since, without one of these suits, the water temperature in the Gulf of Maine or the North Sea can kill you in less than an hour, even in summer.
We also carry working exposure suits from Mustang (see picture bottom right). Again, these are a standard in the North. Look at every oil rig supply vessel and fishing boat from Newfoundland to Norway and this suit, or its Norwegian-made equivalent, is what the crew are wearing. The benefit here is that you can work in them, unlike the survival suit, but they will still keep you alive for up to an hour in zero degree (Celsius) water.
I have to say that we don’t actually wear
ours often since we find a multi layer approach of wool and fleece under
foul weather gear more comfortable and easier to adjust to changes in the
ambient temperature. Also, the Mustang suit is not fully waterproof. (There
is a very expensive and heavy Mustang suit that is, but we don’t recommend
it.)
Where they come into their own is when working in the tender, particularly during high risk activities, like putting in a shore fast in bad weather or dinghy operations when there are large ice bergs around that could overturn and swamp a small boat without warning. The Mustang suit would even give you a good chance of swimming/floating to shore in the case of becoming separated from an overturned dinghy. Once on shore, the suit would keep you alive for hours or even days, even after a dunking.
There is another benefit of having Mustang suits on boats with wheelhouses that I discovered last summer on the 88’ Jongert I was guide/navigator on. On Morgan’s Cloud, with our open cockpit, we keep the heat below turned down low while underway so that everyone stays dressed warmly; of course, the watch stander on deck is fully kitted up for the conditions. In the event of an emergency on deck, the watch stander is ready for action and for the off watch below it is just a matter of throwing on foul weather gear and boots.
However, on the Jongert the crew kept the temperature in the wheelhouse at shirt sleeve level, despite the near freezing wind chill outside. In this case a Mustang suit at the wheelhouse door provided a quick way to get properly dressed in the case of a problem on deck. I can’t say I really liked this hot house approach since there is always the temptation to 'just nip out for a moment' improperly dressed, but I was overruled in the thermostat wars.
Our good friend and crew member, James Hallett, steers Morgan's Cloud toward Baffin island from Greenland wearing a Mustang exposure suit. Yes, those white flakes are snow. I think his eyes were closed because he was fervently hoping that the trip was a bad dream and would disappear when he opened them. He is only wearing an inflatable life jacket because it contained his harness; the Mustang suit would keep him afloat and even has an inflatable head rest.
A final benefit of the Mustang suit is that it gives you a full spare set of clothes that will keep you warm even when wet. I have never reached the bottom of my store of dry clothes but there have been a few rough passages where it has been close.
I like the Mustang MS2195, which can be had for
around US$350 at discount and this is what I recommended for the Jongert
last summer. See www.mustangsurvival.com.
The crew and guests loved them. On Morgan’s Cloud we have 15 year
old classic Mustang suits, which are much the same as the MS2195 (see picture
bottom right).
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