Two Men Watch On Helplessly As The Sea Completely Swallows Up Their Sinking Boat off

[Diesel Bill]

Originally Posted by Pelagic

To clarify, properly installed liferafts are designed to deploy automatically.... But only.in sunken ship mode.
When the ship sinks a hydrostatic release allows the straps holding the canister in its cradle to release and the rafts buoyancy pops it towards the surface.
The activation pendant is about 60 ft long and attached to the ship.
When the ship sinks it tries to pull the raft down but instead fires the trigger pin on the air bottle before detaching at raft via a weak link.

In those conditions , the raft should have been activated manually and the guys could have stepped into them , well before the final plunge to the bottom

Exactly as Pelagic said. I used to give the life raft instructions at the weekly lifeboat drills on the tankers I worked on. Need to secure the lanyard to a cleat before inflating manually or it will float away. A good hard pull on the lanyard will trigger inflation.

[Uncle Bob]

When I looked closely at the video I saw what looked like a foam box floating high with a black band around it and two other items that looked rather like bales wrapped in white and bound with tape, similar to liferafts yet with no apparent lanyard, the second one floated free as the vessel sank. Surely a liferaft would not just have been left lying loose at the bow. Also would a vessel of this type and size have multiple liferafts.
On the other hand perhaps I'm just visually impaired.

[Pelagic]

Originally Posted by a64pilot

I think they saw the rescue vessel long before it got there, and didn’t worry about rafts.
What language was that they were speaking?

I remember watching a training film of a sinking fish boat around Halifax that was in the same "bow up" final throes condition with 4 guys hanging on around the pilothouse.

It was foggy and the rescue boat came rushing up to the casualty to get the guys off.

Apparently their wake was enough to send the fish boat to the bottom and you saw one guy get caught in the bow rigging or lines and dragged down. He didn't survive.

Lesson learned is that if you know the boat is going down, get off into a life raft while you safely can ....and try and keep dry.