How three WA boaters developed a lifesaving device that’s used worldwide

February 1, 2025 9:18 PM

Three Seattle-area sailors were rocked by these losses, and the circumstances behind them: In both cases, it was not physically possible for the woman left aboard to lift her husband from the water. And, in fact, all overboard sailing rescues pose the herculean challenge of hoisting someone several feet onto a boat. As leaders in The Sailing Foundation, the three established its Safety at Sea Committee to research and test crew overboard techniques to help prevent similar cases. And for the next three decades, they volunteered their free time to the development and distribution of a revolutionary device — the Lifesling. ( archive, although with non-working slideshow )

How a reader’s note led to a lesson in lifesaving at sea — and gratitude ( archive )
Here . are . some . videos.

posted by ShooBoo (11 comments total)

very cool! My folks bought a sailboat in '79 when I was a kid and I remember when my dad bought a Lifesling to mount on the stanchions at the stern. It's a different boat now, but there's still a Lifesling there just in case.
posted by jburka at 10:55 PM on February 1 [5 favorites]

That’s a nice story! And also this post proves that MetaFilter has successfully trained me to interpret WA as Western Australia. So I had a little bit of a readjustment when the link opened.
posted by janell at 11:36 PM on February 1 [7 favorites]

I have been trained by FPPs to parse "WA" by default as "Western Australia" now, despite having grown up in Seattle. This post definitely gave me whiplash.
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 5:49 AM on February 2 [3 favorites]

Those tragedies are pretty dramatic. I learned to sail as a navy brat. for a 60th birthday treat my kids sent me and one of them on a weekend dinghy course on a lake in the Irish Midlands . . . to see whether I still had it, like. It was fun, especially the lunches in the lakeside villages. When we came down from the hotel on Sunday morning for our second day's instruction, there was a police car on the other side of the marina. The previous night, a retired couple who lived on one of the yachts had been returning home after a few drinks in the village pub. She missed her footing and plunged into the water between dock and home and had drowned; there being nothing effective that her husband could do about it. As one of the marina workers said cynically: that yacht will be for sale soon. All assurances from the same chap that it was impossible for us to tip out of the sail-boat of which we'd been give in charge were slightly less credible. That summer there was a regular wireless ad from the RNLI LifeBoats claiming "Half the people who drowned last year didn't intend to get wet".
posted by BobTheScientist at 6:57 AM on February 2 [4 favorites]

I am new here after lurking a long time, and recently read some of the comments in a MeTa about someone returning and what has changed.

So imagine my surprise when a post with "WA" in the title was about Washington State and not Western Australia.
posted by fennario at 7:40 AM on February 2 [2 favorites]

Sorry, I just realized other people have said that too and I am probably derailing by not commenting on post content. Unintended.

Spending 3 years of volunteer time to increase safety is really laudable.
posted by fennario at 7:41 AM on February 2

I am so impressed that the inventors didn't try to Get Rich off this, in stark contrast to the guy who invented Saw Stop.
posted by wenestvedt at 7:50 AM on February 2 [3 favorites]

I once watched a group of crew trying to practice a rescue, from one of the tourist boats on lake union. Three guys couldn’t manage to lift the one in the water, using the rescue harness, and eventually he gave up and swam to the ladder on the back of the ship.
posted by funkaspuck at 8:12 AM on February 2 [2 favorites]

Well that's the thing about the LifeSling: most cruising sailboats now have a sugar-scoop transom or a swing-down swim platform, with a collapsing swim ladder, and in most conditions it's not that hard to get a conscious MOB back on board once you've pulled them to the stern with a throw line.

If you're the only one left aboard, retrieving an unconscious MOB is still an unsolved problem – all you can hope to do is get the boat close enough to pull them to the transom, drop a sling around them, and hoist them with a halyard or block on the boom.

On our first short crossing I gave my wife the man-overboard lecture and she asked "but what if I were in the water unconscious?" and I explained what I'd do, as above.

Then she asked "well what if you go in unconscious?" and I said "I hope you meet a nice guy."
posted by nicwolff at 11:02 AM on February 2 [4 favorites]

> Fryer continued racing his custom Perry 42-foot sailboat, Night Runner, until he was in bad health. After one of his final races, legendary Pacific Northwest boat builder Bob Perry, who designed Night Runner, remembers Fryer reciting nautical poems from its cockpit while sipping 151-proof rum.

Sounds like a cool person. Once I become old and infirm, if I can wind down by doing a thrilling outdoor activity, taking a strong drink, and reciting poetry with friends, I think I would feel satisfied with my life.
posted by scose at 12:09 PM on February 2 [4 favorites]

It is amazing how difficult it is to get into even the smallest boat from the water. With a canoe it's do-able with the right technique, though you'll have to bail it afterwards. But an inflatable dingy is nigh-on a fortress unless you've got a rope or ladder to climb up. Once in St. John's (the U.S. Virgin Island, not Canada) we rented a tiny dinghy, went snorkeling, and found to our horror that we couldn't get back in. It was only 15 inches or so but the round, inflated sides of the boat gave no purchase whatsoever. Luckily we were in a fairly populated cay, because eventually some folks on a yacht took pity on us and came over in their dinghy to help. We wouldn't have died, we would have had to tow the dinghy over and stand on the coral (normally a huge no-no because some coral take hundreds of years to reach maturity), but it was very, very scary. Glad to know someone has a refined device for this.
posted by wnissen at 9:52 AM on February 4 [1 favorite]