When Life Cell inventor Scott Smiles went to sea for what was supposed to be a short pleasure trip, the result was far from what he had expected. Something went catastrophically wrong – and he and his friend Rick and their respective sons Riley and Ryan found themselves in the water, clinging to a cool box and having grabbed a hand-held radio from the boat before it went down.
‘He was struck by the fact that all the safety equipment was there on board – but the problem was that it was all kept in different places,’ said Sally Dale of Pinpoint Electronics, the European distributor for the Life Cell, the innovative safety kit that resulted from the startlingly sudden loss of Scott’s boat.
‘They were in the water for more than two hours and were picked up. Because he had managed to make a mayday call had grabbed the boat’s EPIRB, the search was taking place around the right area. But he hadn’t been able to reach the flares before abandoning the boat, so they four people in the waters holding on to a cool box weren’t able to alert the search to where they were,’ Sally Dale said.
An incident that that could easily have resulted in the loss of four lives set Scott Smiles thinking and within two days he had already designed the prototype Life Cell, a self-contained, buoyant safety kit capable of floating free from a sinking vessel, with no need to rely on a hydrostatic release mechanism to free it.
‘Scott always says that it started as just a normal day. But when it happens, it happens in seconds,’ Sally Dale said. ‘That’s why the Life Cell is designed to have a full kit of essential gear that can be either provided as a standard package or customised to the user’s requirements. It puts everything in one place.’
