Step up into the liferaft. That single sentence is the most important thing anyone ever taught me about abandoning ship, and it is worth more than a whole shelf of survival manuals. You only climb up into the raft when the deck has sunk to your knees, when the boat is genuinely going down underneath you. The reason is grim and well documented: boats have been abandoned and then found floating weeks or months later, while the crew who took to the raft never made it. A yacht, even a holed and sinking one, is a bigger, drier, more visible survival platform than any liferaft. You leave it last, not first.
That principle frames everything else. A liferaft is the final option, not the second one. Most of this article is about the decisions and drills that mean you never have to use it, and about doing it properly if you must.
When abandoning is genuinely the right call
There are really only two situations where stepping off is correct. The first is fire that you cannot control and that has reached, or is about to reach, the fuel or gas. Fire moves faster than water, and a boat well alight is no longer a survival platform; my piece on fire aboard a boat covers why the decision to abandon a burning boat is made early rather than late. The second is flooding you cannot stem and cannot outpump, where the boat is visibly going down and you have run out of options to slow it.
Everything short of that, you stay and fight. A dismasting is not an abandon-ship situation. A holed boat you are keeping afloat with the pumps is not, yet. A grounding is not. The instinct to get into the safe-looking orange tent is powerful and usually wrong. The discipline is to keep working the problem on the boat until the boat itself tells you, by sinking, that it is over.
The grab bag, packed before you need it
If you do go, you go with the means to survive and be found. A liferaft comes with a basic equipment pack, but the survival kit you actually want lives in a grab bag you have prepared yourself and stowed somewhere you can reach in seconds. Mine holds, at minimum:
- An EPIRB or PLB, registered, with a current battery. This is the single item that turns a search into a rescue, because it gives the authorities your identity and position.
- A handheld VHF, waterproof and charged, so you can talk to rescuers once they are close.
- Flares, including handheld red flares for pinpointing your position to an aircraft or vessel that is already near.
- Drinking water and high-energy food.
- A knife, a torch, a whistle, sun protection and any essential medication.
- Passports and ship's papers in a waterproof wallet, because being rescued into France with no documents is its own headache.
The single most important habit is knowing where the grab bag is in the dark, with the boat lurching, possibly with smoke or water around you. If you have to think about it, it is in the wrong place.
The drill nobody wants to run
Commercial ships under the SOLAS regime are required to run an abandon-ship drill and a fire drill every month, and to practise with the liferafts at intervals of no more than four months. Pleasure crews are not obliged to do any of this, which is exactly why so few of us ever do, and why the first real abandon-ship is also the first rehearsal. That is a bad way to learn.
You do not need to inflate your raft in the marina to get most of the benefit. On a calm day, walk the crew through it. Where is the raft, and how does it deploy: is it a throw-over canister or a cradle release? Where is the painter tied, and how long is it? Who carries the grab bag and who carries the EPIRB? Who triggers the DSC alert and who counts heads? Make everyone put a lifejacket on in the dark and find and fire a flare by touch. Twenty minutes of this, once a season, rewrites how the crew behave when it is real.
Two details people get wrong. The raft painter must be made fast to a strong point before you throw the canister, or you will watch your raft drift away inflated and empty. And you launch the raft on the lee side, downwind of the hull, so it does not get blown back and chafed against the boat or trapped underneath it.
Calling for help comes first
Abandoning is the end of a sequence, not the start. Long before anyone steps off, you should have raised the alarm, because a raft full of people with no help on the way is a far worse place to be than one the coastguard already knows about. The order is: send the distress call, then get the gear ready, then leave the boat only when she goes.
A sinking or a serious fire is grave and imminent danger, so it is a mayday. Trigger the DSC distress alert, which sends your identity and position at the press of the dedicated button, then make the voice mayday on channel 16. Have the French distress and safety call procedure on a laminated card by the radio so it is not running on memory. In French waters that call is answered by CROSS, and it helps to know in advance which French CROSS coastguard station covers the patch you are sailing, because the boundaries shift as you move along the coast.
If you abandon successfully and are picked up, there is a paperwork tail to all of it, and reporting the loss to the French authorities is part of getting home. That is a problem for another day, but it exists.
Choosing and siting the raft
A raft you cannot reach is no raft at all, and where you stow it matters as much as which one you buy. A valise stuffed in a cockpit locker under the fenders and the spare warps will not be deployed in the thirty seconds you may have. A canister in a dedicated cradle on the pushpit or coachroof, with a hydrostatic or manual release you understand, is reachable when the boat is on its side or filling. For coastal cruising in French waters most of us carry a four or six-man coastal raft; the offshore specification matters more for Biscay and beyond. The detail of matching a raft to your cruising is worth its own read, and I have set it out in choosing a liferaft for French coastal.
Two ongoing duties come with owning one. It needs servicing on the manufacturer's schedule at an approved station, because the pack contents and the inflation gear degrade and a raft that will not inflate is a very expensive bag. And the painter, the line that both tethers the raft and triggers the inflation, needs to be made fast to a strong point before you ever throw the canister. Throw an untied canister and you watch your survival platform inflate and drift away.
Counting heads and staying together
Once the raft is in the water and tethered, the discipline is order, not scramble. The strongest crew member often goes first to stabilise the raft and help others in, then the rest, then whoever is managing the boat. Count heads out loud, by name, because a missing person noticed immediately can still be reached. Bring the grab bag and the EPIRB; do not go back for valuables. Once everyone is aboard, cut the painter only when you are clear that staying tethered to a sinking or burning boat is the greater danger, otherwise the raft can be dragged down or scorched.
In cold water, every one of these movements is harder and slower than it sounds in the cabin, which is the whole argument for rehearsing the sequence on a calm day rather than discovering it for the first time in anger.
The raft as a last resort, properly understood
I keep my liferaft serviced, I know its launch drill, and I hope with some feeling that I never pull the painter in anger. The point of all this is not to make the raft feel comforting. It is to make the boat feel like the better option for as long as humanly possible, so that the decision to abandon is forced on you by water over the rail and nothing less. Step up into the raft. Until the sea is doing the stepping for you, stay with the boat and keep fighting.
