kateandjohnsail.boats

This new change to Quintessa is not glamourous, but falls under the category of making a safer boat. Pictured here is our life raft, in its new location.

If we should need to deploy it in an emergency, the procedure would be to pull a pin in the top rail so that the container falls down toward the steps and off the stern. There is a line tied to the rail and attached to the raft. We would pull and pull and pull on that line, and at about 8 meters, some canisters would automatically inflate the raft.

How do we know this? Well, at our Safety at Sea seminar in January we saw a demonstration in a pool in San Diego, and then we and others actually got in the raft from the water. It was a good experience to have, albeit one we never intend to repeat. It was really stinky in that raft with four other wet people.

What is new about our arrangement is that for whatever reason, Quintessa’s life raft was formerly located in a different place: inside the rail and flat on the back deck. This was always puzzling to us because the device in its frame was not only difficult to deploy into the water, it also was seriously bolted to the deck right over another bit of safety equipment.

The emergency tiller access (show by the arrow) is another essential bit of gear that one hopes never to deploy. It is a place to insert a rudimentary tiller to steer the boat if the main steering system, which we carefully maintain, broke and needed to be bypassed. If this rare situation happened, it would be ugly if the emergency tiller access was seriously obstructed, which it was.

A bonus of the new configuration is that we have gained some really nice real estate on the back deck. We could hold a square dance there, or at least I may be able to do yoga. We have also been able to move my bike to a better location.