Snowberry life raft color

You learn something new every day ... I was basing that on the floater nets I saw on the USS North Carolina when I toured her several years ago (I just HAD to reach up and try to pull the end of it out of the basket to see how it was made, but it was too high). I guess with enough coats of paint, it would feel like rubber. Sure looked like it.

mfsob wrote:

However, the floater nets carried by many US ships were left in their natural black rubber color, although the baskets that held them were painted the appropriate camouflage hue.

Actually, the floater "nets" on US ships were lengths of rope with hard foam floats.   They were not rubber.   They were similar to lane ropes you might see on today's swimming pools. 

from the Floating Drydock Plan eBook

Depends on where the liferaft was located on the ship but, in general, both the US and the Brits followed the rule of painting the life rafts whatever color the camouflage behind it was - and if a color demarcation line ran through the middle of the raft, you got a two-toned raft. Of  course, this could vary from ship to ship depending on local conditions like the availability of paint.

However, the floater nets carried by many US ships were left in their natural black rubber color, although the baskets that held them were painted the appropriate camouflage hue.

Thanks for that info

The Carley float was not made of rubber.

The definition I have is:

A life-raft in the form of a large oval ring of canvas painted to make it waterproof and stuffed with kapok or granulated cork, and with a light wooden  grid inside the oval and hand lines on the outer circumference.

Most of the photos I have seen show the floats are painted a pale colour usually to match the  camouflage of the ship.

With regard to Snowberry all the photos  indicate this.

Snowberry also had two different shaped floats as can be seen on my own humble modelling effort.