Fishermen's life raft failed to float free and inflate

Three fishermen died because their incorrectly stowed life raft failed to float free and automatically inflate when their vessel sank, an accident report said.

Had the life raft floated free and inflated it was "entirely possible" that the fishing boat's skipper David McFarlane, 35, and his crewmen, Jack Craig, 21, and Robert Prowse, 20, would have been saved.

The three men had set off from Weymouth in Dorset on the wooden potting vessel Purbeck Isle when the heavily-loaded boat suddenly foundered nine miles off Portland Bill in Dorset on the morning of May 17 last year.