Welcome aboard. What do you mean you're scared? Of course you're scared. What are you complaining about? Sure you're crammed in here, your legs overlapping your mates' as you bask in your regulated, sumptuous four square feet of allotted space. Sure you feel like barfing because this raft stinks and feels like riding a jellyfish roller coaster. Sure you're cold. But hey, that's why it's called survival: to remain alive or in existence. That's it. Bare bones. Get used to it. Think where you'd be without any life raft or boat.

You thought being in a raft would be better than back in the boat? You thought that when you pulled the raft's rip chord maybe a brand new 40-foot cutter would pop out? Get real and be thankful skipper made you wait to bail out until you could "step up" to the raft; otherwise you wouldn't have gotten off that radio message or had the chance to gather the most gear.Steven Callahan

Fortunately, conditions were not too horrendous when we did bail out, so it wasn't too hard to get the 100-pound, four-man raft overboard. It would have been nicer had the raft been lighter and smaller, but we'll be thankful that this raft is more heavily built. Since each case is unique, all safety equipment manufacturers try to satisfy the mutually-exclusive aims of making the gear simple, inexpensive, foolproof, light and small enough to slip into your pocket like a pack of cards while being as commodious as the Queen Mary – and providing unlimited features to address every conceivable kind of weather, situation and contingency. In reality, most good, heavily built and well-equipped rafts, especially those approved by SOLAS or the Coast Guard, must be rather large and bulky. Still, in storm conditions, I don't know if we would have gotten our heavy raft over in time.

We were also lucky that our boat wasn't rolled prior to abandoning ship, because our raft was cradled on deck, totally exposed to the sea. Luckily our raft cradle was heavily built and securely bolted through the deck, but because even quarter-inch bolts on some cradles have been sheared when boats have been rolled, all rafts and auxiliary safety gear would be most secure in a handy deck locker set flush into the hull or cockpit. Specialized lockers built into the boat would help protect the raft from long-term environmental damage too. Water intrusion into soft valises often have deteriorated metals due to electrolysis, and damaged fabrics.

Although water can also penetrate fiberglass canisters in heavy stainless racks, these offer much better protection than valises, which ideally should be stored in dry lockers. Some manufacturers also offer shrink-wrapped rafts, which also protect them from long-term damage during storage. Integral emergency-equipment lockers built into the mother craft, though, especially if positioned near the boat's perimeter and aft, such as in the lazarette with a door through the transom, could have allowed even a single crew member to deploy even a heavy raft and gear with a single yank of a lanyard.

'LET'S FACE THE MUSIC'

What if we couldn't get the raft off before the boat went down? A hydrostatic release would have let the raft go, but some crews have found their rafts prematurely deployed by the high water pressure created when their boats got rolled or overwhelmed by huge waves. A hydro-release or no hydro-release? That is just one of the plethora of judgment calls between compromises a crew must make when selecting gear on which their lives may become dependent.

Proper tethering is essential, of course. Many rafts have simply flown away in the wind when crews deployed them before making sure they were tied to strong points on the mother craft. We did that right, as well as making sure all our emergency equipment ditch kits – or "going away bags," as a friend calls them – were attached to long tethers, which allowed us to deploy the heavy, bulky raft first and then the bags, preventing all from getting separated from us, and lost.

So here we are, safe in the raft, at least for the moment. But it's not over yet, and nothing is as dangerous as false optimism and denial of danger. So let's face the music. We can still die of a lot of things: (a) fear, hypothermia (exposure) and physical injury, which can kill in minutes to hours, even in relatively warm waters, (b) dehydration, which can kill in days (about 10 average), and (c) hunger, which can kill in weeks (about 30 days).

The raft itself won't heal us, hydrate us or feed us. It's only the base requirement: a shelter and platform from which we can use our all-important survival tools. Right now it's cold. If our raft has a single-skin, non-inflated floor, I hope we salvaged air mattresses or cushions on which to sit. A raft with an inflated floor not only provides insulation but also protects us from bumping fish and sharks, which will be especially appreciated when we develop open-ulcers on the skin known as salt water sores, which can begin forming in a matter of days. A removable air pillow type floor allows water to drain away from us to help prevent sores and heat loss. If need be, we can lift it to repair it or the floor. A built-in inflated floor would prevent a leak into the interior if the bottom or top sheets of the floor are holed. In any case, there are no long-term survival voyages in cold waters, so I hope we have survival or immersion suits, or at least space blankets and chemical heat packs to keep our body temperatures up.

'IF THIS THING CAPSIZES'

The tent-like raft canopy helps keep us warm and protects us from the sun. This one is sealed to the raft tubes all around except at the entry opening, which unfortunately reduces ventilation in good weather. The single entry also impeded boarding compared to an open, roll-up type canopy, but some roll-ups are not secure enough to face hard weather, which would be horrible now that the weather is worse and we're flying around as if we were in a continuous auto accident. Whether the canopy is a roll-down type or fixed, it must be glued and taped to the inflation tubes all around or jets of water are going to force their way in here and rip the thing apart.