Testing the Crewfit Junior and Crewfit Adult Lifejackets
By Jill Dickin Schinas • Published on Friday, 24th October 2008 in Gear Tests
What will happen if you fall in?
WHY TEST YOUR LIFEJACKET ?
The majority of yachtsmen never, ever use their lifejackets. They may wear them on deck but most are careful enough - or lucky enough - never to fall in, and most are blasé enough - or careless enough - never to get round to trying them out in the water.
This makes no sense.
How many times have you bought something - a camera, perhaps, or a tool, or a cooking utensil - and found that it did not perform according to your expectations? It may have performed badly, or it may have performed extraordinarily well - or it may simply have done something rather different from what you expected. It is easy, if you have never used a product, to overlook certain drawbacks or to lose track of your own requirements. For instance, until I bought a camcorder I had never realised how difficult it is to get good film footage on a machine which has a side-screen but no view-finder. Clearly, knowing how a product will behave when it is used is important - particularly when the product is something on which your life may depend.
Now, admittedly, you are not going to want to try out all of the safety gear in your life. You are not going to want to test the air-bag in your car, and testing the seatbelts would be a seriously bad idea. When it comes to this sort of thing we must depend on the manufacturers to do the testing. But lifejackets are a different matter.
Air bags and seat-belts are all much of a muchness, and they all come in one size. Lifejackets come in a wide variety of styles, sizes, and types; not every lifejacket fits every sailor, and not every lifejacket performs equally well. Moreover, whereas seat belts, etcetera, are rigorously tested in conditions which approximate to those that they may someday face - with simulated head on crashes - lifejackets are tested in a swimming pool. If you feel that this is sufficient… well, you presumably haven’t seen the Solent on a boisterous day, and you certainly haven’t seen the Atlantic.
If you have never been in the water in your lifejacket you probably don’t give its performance much thought. If pressed you would probably say that you expected it to inflate smoothly and roll you onto your back. What you would not expect would be for it to grip you round the throat like a hangman’s noose, float you with your feet in the air, or fail altogether to inflate. That sort of performance would come as a bit of a surprise. Continue Reading…
