Our local club had a "flare shoot" event yesterday, where people
brought a few out-dated flares to practice firing them. It's a great
idea to become familiar with how your flares work, so that under
stress & in difficult circumstances, it will be more likely that you
can successfully use them.

Here is what we learned: More expensive really is better. We have a
25mm flare pistol instead of a 12g, and the aerial flares it shoots go
more than twice as high and are more than twice as bright. Needless to
say, the gun & it's flares are a good bit more expensive (maybe more
than 2x). It also has noticable recoil and a MUCH louder report.

The oldest flares in the shoot expired in the late 1980s (no it wasn't
me that had kept them all those years). The flares still burned
brightly, but the match-style strikers were soft & crumbly &
ineffective. It would be very difficult or impossible to light one of
these in a storm, however once you got one going you could chain-smoke
them easily.

The flares we brought were between 5 & 12 years old, and all except
one (more below) worked perfectly.

Paines-Wessex makes a hand held flare that has a compression striker
inside a spring-loaded cap (labelled Mark 7). They are easy to light,
the striker is sealed, and they are more than twice as bright as the
cheaper more common Orion handheld flares. I'm getting some as soon as
I can find them.

In general, SOLAS-rated flares are lot better and worth the extra
money... it is far more difficult to see distress signals under
adverse conditions than you can believe, until you've been there.

Hand held flares drip burning phosphorus/paraffin so they must be held
carefully.

Orange smoke markers are great. They will attract a lot more attention
during the daytime than a flare. Unlike normal flares, burning two at
once will be much more effective.

An alternative to the flare gun are the hand launched rockets. I have
bunch of these, and some are expired, so I brought one to see how it
would work. Unfortunately, the striker failed. It was one of those
pull-string kind and I don't know if it wasn't pulled sharply enough
or if the striker was defective. However, I now realize that these
things are very limited and you don't get a second chance to try them.
I won't be getting more, but I may look for some percussion cap
ignited HH rockets.

I'm not sure what was permissions were necessary to do this, I have
asked the USCG before to hold a practice flare shoot and they always
laughed and said 'Not only no, but H#%% NO!' I have practiced shooting
flares on the 4th of July but that's not approved either. One thing to
be careful of is accidentally setting underbrush on fire ashore... yes
it really happens!

Fresh Breezes- Doug King