How to Sail on a Budget: Tom Cunliffe’s Column
This month, Tom Cunliffe muses on how sailing has been likened to standing under a cold shower ripping up £10 notes. It’s an outlook that occasionally has the ring of truth. Tom opted to take economising measures…
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Tom Cunliffe’s July Column
Like the rest of us, I’m always keeping a weather eye on my boating budget. I never begrudge a penny on sails and I won’t sell my engine short on filters, oil, coolant, belts and the rest. There’s no escape from the annual hit for antifouling, and if the propeller shaft starts wobbling in the cutless bearing, stump up I must. This year I’ve treated myself to one or two new lengths of Dyneema running rigging. It’ll be a joy all summer. It’s the safety equipment that sticks in my throat. I part with hundreds of pounds of the hard-earned and if Fortune favours my efforts I’ll probably never use the stuff.
Take the liferaft: I’ve had the same one for ages and, every two years, here it is again demanding a service. I’m a hands-on sort of chap so two seasons ago I decided to tackle the job myself. There can’t be much to it, I thought. Because most of my sailing is around the coast these days I’m not particularly interested in the tins of biscuits, the cans of water and everything else that might be in the pack. The important thing to me is that when I throw it over the side and pull the ripcord it’s going to inflate, the canopy will open and the tubes haven’t perished from old age. With these priorities in mind, I imagined I could pull it out of its valise, open it up, scrutinise the tubes and check the gas cylinder that blows it up. If this was anything like the ones on my lifejackets, I thought, I’d reassure myself by unscrewing it, peering at the numbers stamped in the side to see what its weight should be and replacing it if it fell short. I could then check the various gadgets for firing it to make sure they were in good shape, examine the drogue and the blunt-nosed knife, perhaps replace the night-light battery and cram the whole thing back into the bag. I’d save myself two or three hundred pounds for what couldn’t be more than a morning’s work.
How naïve can you get?
It came out of the valise OK, but I soon discovered it was in a hermetically sealed plastic bag. This was not a promising start. Never despair, however. My raft is stowed in a place that, if it ever gets wet, the least of my worries will be that the inner bag has been damaged, so I pressed on and carefully worked my way in. Once I had the beast open on my front lawn, Plan A went smoothly enough until I started to re-pack it into the valise. I folded, re-folded, turned it this way and that, then upside down, getting hotter and more bothered as the sun climbed steadily up the sky. It was lunch-time when the thing finally sent me a message that couldn’t be ignored. I must have caught the painter under my foot, because the cylinder went off with a loud bang that brought the neighbours out in short order. Instead of witnessing the first terrorist attack in the history of our sleepy Wiltshire village, they arrived just as I disappeared under a fully inflated four-man liferaft.
At this point I accepted defeat. I deflated the raft as far as I could then manoeuvred it with difficulty into the car and delivered it apologetically to Ocean Safety down in Southampton. I expected a thorough finger-wagging from the professionals, but to their credit they had a good laugh instead, then they scooped up the flabby remains and whisked it away. A week later I picked it up, duly tested, certificated and packed according to the Merchant Shipping Act, or some such guidance issued by our betters to protect the adventurous and foolish. I never tried that again.
A few months later a pal of mine who was also fed up with paying through the nose to save his hide confessed to a far worse mistake then mine. He also attempted the job himself – on a day so rainy there was nothing else he could achieve. He humped the canister into his shed and got stuck in. His shed was not big and when he reached the stage where I had come to grief, the raft went off just like mine, only instead of spreading itself on the grass for the amusement of the passers-by, it expanded rapidly, filling the available volume between the rough brick wall and the work bench.
It was perhaps unfortunate that he was standing at the bench at the time. As the orange raft expanded, he found himself being swept off his feet and driven against the wall. It all happened so swiftly that he failed to grab his last chance of escape. When the monster went into its ‘exhale mode’, noisily blowing off any unneeded gas after fully inflating the tubes, he found himself pressed hard against the wall. The masonry showed no sign of giving way. He was trapped.
As it happened, the shed was out of earshot from the nearest human presence, so he didn’t bother to shout for help. Instead, he wrestled and wriggled and shoved for half an hour. He became intimately acquainted with a two-foot section of the tubing and its associated canopy area, but he gained no traction whatever. At this point he stopped for a breather and saw the supreme irony of his situation. Here he was with two thousand pounds-worth of gear on top of him that was meant to save his life. If nobody showed up for a week, he’d die of thirst and starvation instead of drowning like a gentleman. Since this seemed a poor trade-off, he did what any properly equipped sailor would have done. He groped in his pocket for the lock-blade knife he always carried. The blade clicked open and, after taking a long hard look at what he was about to do to his bank balance, he made the unkindest cut of all. The raft went down with a satisfying hiss, the pressure came off his tortured body and he sloped off in search of the rum bottle.
Many of us do our sailing in the summer months on the continental shelf and choose our weather from the remarkable predictions available free of charge via the telephone screen. If ever we have to hop off the yacht, we won’t be in mid-ocean and we’ll surely take our phones and hand-held VHF with us. Even if the DSC Mayday we broadcast before stepping over the rail has gone wrong, we still have plenty of chance of attracting rescuers in reasonably short order. Of course, if we’re planning a cruise to Fair Isle by way of St Kilda and Rockall, this may not be the case, but it seems to me that for many people the standard liferaft is probably over-specced. It is also pretty heavy. My four-man unit is so unwieldy that my fit, agile wife can’t deal with it alone if I’m incapacitated. For all these reasons I am re-equipping this season with a lighter, lower-spec raft. It has a single tube with welded seams, a decent floor and an excellent canopy that self-inflates. It’s a two-man unit and anyone can manhandle the pack with ease. A number of these are on the market, but I’m going for aircraft industry quality. You’d think so simple a raft would be cheaper than the heftier equivalent. Perhaps because of low numbers it isn’t at the moment, but servicing is cheaper when the time comes because there’s no pack inside with things I don’t want. It’s so much lighter and smaller that I can stow the valise anywhere without compromising other gear. In short, it’s what I actually need and no more. It wouldn’t do off Cape Horn in hooligan weather, but I’m planning no such events. I’ve served my time in deep water with a full-on SOLAS raft, but these days my safety gear is a bit like my oilskins. I don’t really need bullet-proof, multi-layered outfits that cost a week’s stay at the Ritz. I’m happy with something to keep the water out, a flat cap and some comfy woollies that smell like an honest wet sheep if they ever get wet. That’ll do me!
More from Tom Cunliffe:
- How to Avoid Cabin Fever: Tom Cunliffe’s Column
- How to Prevent Food Waste at Sea: Tom Cunliffe’s Cooking Guide
- Tom Cunliffe: What to do with no Berths in Town
Show Me More:
- The WORLDSTAR 2026 Race: Circumnavigate in your Own Boat
- Southampton Boat Show 2024: What to Expect
- South Atlantic Cruising: Sailing Cape Town to Brazil
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