Lifeboat Heroes: Outstanding RNLI Rescues from Three Centuries Read online

  14. Hayling Island, 25 October 1992

  Rod James and Frank Dunster earn the RNLI Silver Medal taking crewmembers off the 75ft ketch, Donald Searle, aground in heavy seas at the entrance to Chichester Harbour. James becomes the only man to date to win a second Silver Medal aboard an inshore lifeboat.

  It is a wild October Sunday morning and it reminds Frank Dunster of the weekend on Hayling Island more than a decade earlier when he had spent a frantic three-and-a-half hours at the helm of the Atlantic 21, attending to eight separate incidents inside and outside Chichester Harbour where pleasure-seekers had been caught out in a Force 9 south-easterly gale.

  Waves had been up to eight feet high even inside the harbour and, beyond its protection, the 21ft rigid inflatable lifeboat had come close to capsize on a number of occasions, once being thrown almost beyond the vertical by a heavy sea. One of his crewmembers, Rod James, had twice gone overboard that day, once by accident when helping to get a grounded yacht off the sands and once on purpose when he braved huge breakers to grab a 17-year-old who had been clinging to a groyne for his life and who had just let go.

  For saving the boy’s life, (a pupil at the school where he taught), James became only the third man from an Atlantic 21 to win the RNLI Silver Medal; for his helmsmanship, Frank Dunster won a bar to an earlier Bronze Medal.

  All that happened on a busy Saturday in mid-September 1981 and at least today, being later in the season, there is a bit less activity on the water. The 50-knot westerly gale hasn’t stopped the windsurfers in the harbour, though; rather it has encouraged many of the hardier ones and Frank Dunster is not particularly surprised to hear, on arriving at the lifeboat house, that the lifeboat is already out, bringing one of them in difficulties to safety.

  Just before midday one of the small group of people, gathered in the empty lifeboathouse, holds up a hand to silence the others. He is closest to the radio receiver and is listening to an exchange between the Coastguard and a yacht skipper. It is what he thought he heard — ‘Mayday, Mayday, Mayday’ — the Donald Searle, a 75ft sail-training ketch has got her anchors down at the eastern end of Chichester Bar, her sails have blown out and her engines have overheated and failed. Twenty-foot breaking seas are hurling her about and she is dragging slowly eastward towards the sunken Target Wreck. There are 17 crew and trainees on board.

  The Coastguard is quick to react. The 47ft Tyne class lifeboat from Bembridge is called and they also notify Rod James, today’s helmsman aboard Hayling Island’s Atlantic 21, Aldershot. They realise, though, that he is not instantly available as he is still dealing with the windsurfer.

  Frank Dunster cannot stand idly by, knowing how dangerous a position the yacht is in. He has a 28ft, single-engine, rigid inflatable of his own, Hayling Rescue, kept at the nearby marina and used often as a rescue boat for the local sailing club. With two volunteers from the lifeboat station, Damien Taylor and Evan Lamperd, he is soon afloat and powering south towards the harbour entrance with the jagged outline of 20ft breakers on the bar ahead of him.

  He reaches the bar and realises immediately that there is no hope of the Bembridge lifeboat getting near to the ketch to tow her clear of danger. She is in far too shallow water and dragging her anchor perilously close to the wreck. They must get the crew off. He radios urgently for helicopter assistance and steels himself and his crew for an attempt to get alongside. Whether he is in the lifeboat or his own rescue boat, there is one type of sea which he always fears. It is the 16ft solid wall of water which becomes unstable in the shallows, with the top four feet curling, then breaking. You can’t get clear of it so you have to face it head on. There is no knowing whether the boat will go through it or ride up it and possibly fall over backwards with the force of the breaking crest.

  Using all his experience and skill, accelerating, then slowing as he reads the mood of each wave, Frank Dunster draws near to the yacht. Just as he feared, one wave throws his bow high into the air, but it slams down again, much to the relief of the crew. It takes two attempts to get alongside the casualty’s starboard quarter but when they do, one of the yacht’s crew is ready and is pulled aboard Hayling Rescue. The second approach nearly ends in disaster. First, the ketch surges high above her on a wave, then crashes down, inches from her bow. Then a female crewmember leaps from the Donald Searle, misses the RIB and lands in the water. Taylor and Lamperd are quick to reach over the rubber sponson and haul her, spluttering, into the boat.

  Dunster knows he must not chance his luck any further. One of these waves would surely capsize his boat and with two survivors now on board, his job was to get them to safety before that happened. Bembridge lifeboat and the helicopter could not be far away now so, with that thought, he turns north towards the shore, this time fighting to keep the boat straight as she rides the heavy surf charging in haphazardly through the harbour entrance. He reaches the lifeboat station at 12.35pm, only 23 minutes since he set out, although it feels more like a lifetime.

  By now, Rod James aboard the Atlantic 21 lifeboat has landed the shivering windsurfer and, with his crew, Christopher Reed and Warren Hayles, is taking his turn at negotiating the brutish walls of water on the bar. One is so steep that it stands the lifeboat up on its end. Warren Hayles is thrown backwards out of his seat but manages to stay on board. Rod James’s grip on the steering wheel keeps him on board, although he is convinced the boat is going over on top of him and he takes a deep breath in anticipation. The bow teeters at the vertical and both engines cut out.

  People on the shore gasp as they see the bow reaching for the sky and will it to return the way it went up. Their prayers are answered and James and Reed, still in their seats, stretch forward to press the port and starboard starter buttons. The engines fire up just before the next mammoth wave arrives and the helmsman has control once more. Elated to have survived such a near disaster, Roderick James is now all the more determined to get to the stricken ketch.

  As he manoeuvres close to her, has to decide: are the people aboard better off staying put or should he try to get them ashore? They will not be particularly safe aboard the lifeboat, but if the ketch founders, he will have 15 people in the water and that would be much worse. The pilot of the Sea King search and rescue helicopter from Lee-on-Solent which has just arrived clearly believes that evacuation is a must, as he is attempting to pass a line to the vessel’s crew in preparation for winching.

  James drives the lifeboat’s inflated sponson up against the ketch’s side five times, staying there just long enough each time for Christopher Reed, in the bow, to grab a crewmember before the larger vessel rises up on a swell and falls back on top of where the lifeboat has just been. The Atlantic 21 helmsman then sees that the helicopter has still not got its line to the remaining yacht crewmembers — it is being hampered by the violent motion and the mizzen mast. So on his next run in he asks Reed to leap aboard to help, but not before two more yachtsmen are dragged into the lifeboat.

  The view from the Hayling Island Atlantic 21 inshore lifeboat of the stricken ketch, Donald Searle, the Coastguard helicopter and Frank Dunster’s RIB, Hayling Rescue.

  Reed wedges himself between the aft cabin and the guard rail and grabs the line from the helicopter to allow the winchman to make his descent. Leaving Reed aboard the ketch, Rod James now heads for Hayling lifeboat station to land his seven survivors knowing that Bembridge lifeboat, now on scene, and the helicopter can complete the evacuation. On the 15 minute journey back to the shore, the Atlantic 21 passes Frank Dunster aboard Hayling Rescue on his way back out to the rescue scene.

  Of the remaining survivors, Bembridge lifeboat takes one aboard but both vessels are damaged in the process when the yacht is thrown 20ft to leeward by a sea. The remaining seven, together with Christopher Reed, are hoisted into the helicopter and landed near the lifeboat station on Hayling Island. Both Hayling Rescue and the Atlantic 21, which is also back at the casualty after landing survivors, can now, once more, return to station and safety.

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p; The empty Donald Searle is recovered the next day, a few hundred yards west of the Target Wreck and severely damaged by the pounding she has received on the sands.

  Both Rod James and Frank Dunster received the RNLI Silver Medal for their achievements in conditions many would have judged too extreme for the boats at their disposal. Rod James is still, to this day, the only inshore lifeboatman to win two Silver Medals and Frank Dunster joined a very rare breed to receive three bravery medals in his career as an inshore helmsman.

  15. Lerwick, 19 November 1997

  In a rescue where helicopter winchman Bill Deacon loses his life after saving the last ten men from the freighter Green Lily in a near hurricane, Coxswain Hewitt Clark earns the RNLI Gold Medal for bringing his lifeboat alongside the ship within yards of the shore and saving five of her crew.

  What circumstances could lead to a soft-spoken, modest, Shetland harbour pilot finding himself as a travelling guest of honour aboard the liner, Queen Elizabeth 2, sharing the speaker’s platform with the likes of Terry Waite and the author Bernard Cornwell? Whatever they were, they also caused Hewitt Clark to be the subject of an ambush by a man whose face was familiar and who was clutching a red book with gold lettering on its cover who would later recount his life’s exploits to a BBC audience of millions.

  There was quite some story to tell; for his services as coxswain of Lerwick lifeboat, Hewitt Clark, MBE, had four times received the RNLI’s official Thanks on Vellum, the Bronze Medal for bravery three times, the Silver once and, in November 1997, the ultimate recognition of a Gold Medal when five petrified Croatian seamen were dragged aboard his lifeboat while 50ft seas broke over them. Hewitt Clark was the most decorated lifeboatman of his time and whether he was comfortable about it or not, people wanted to listen to him.

  The Shetland Islands may be remote but during Hewitt Clark’s tenure as coxswain, they would have seen a greater weight and variety of seagoing commercial traffic than most other parts of the British Isles. The North Sea oil and gas industry with its base at Sullom Voe reached its peak of activity between the 1970s and 1990s and the decrepit but abundant Russian fish factory ships of that era added to the regular island traffic of ferries, fishing boats and summertime pleasure craft.

  The factory ships or ‘klondikers’ were a particular source of concern for the rescue services. Poorly maintained and crowded with workers employed in the process of canning mackerel caught by local fishermen, they were especially vulnerable when the weather blew up in the area. The service records of Lerwick lifeboat are littered with incidents where these ships, with names such as Azu, Lunokhods 1, Borodinskoye Polye and Pionersk, had been driven ashore by a gale and the lifeboat had had to take considerable risks close to the rocks to rescue the people on board.

  It was to the Pionersk in October 1994 that Hewitt Clark earned his Silver Medal. The factory ship had run aground three miles south of Lerwick in storm force winds. There was less than 100ft between the wrecked ship and the cliff but this did not deter Clark from taking the Arun class lifeboat, Soldian, into that gap of shallow water, in darkness and confused breaking seas, to allow 64 people to crowd aboard the lifeboat and be brought safely ashore.

  Three years after the Pionersk service, Lerwick was to say goodbye to its Arun class lifeboat, Soldian, which had served her crew so reliably for 19 years. In her place came a lifeboat which, to the untrained eye, looked similar in many respects, although she was clearly bulkier than her predecessor. She was, in fact, a Severn class lifeboat, one of a new generation of all-weather lifeboat design and Lerwick was one of the earliest stations to be allocated such a boat. At a length of 55ft, the class was the largest in the fleet and had been designed to achieve a maximum speed of 25 knots, making her the most powerful lifeboat ever built.

  Getting a lifeboat to be strong enough for the task, yet light and powerful enough for the required speed and manoeuvrability, had proved a difficult balancing act for RNLI technicians and the development of the Severn had taken longer than was originally planned. As with any new class of lifeboat, crews around the country were looking for proof that what the RNLI had to offer as a replacement to the trusty Arun did, in fact, represent real progress and was worth the extra effort and expense of caring for a more highly-strung machine. The story of the performance of RNLB Michael and Jane Vernon off the outlying Shetland island of Bressay on the afternoon of Wednesday 19 November did much to provide the proof the crews were looking for.

  As he watched the dimly-lit white hull of the 3,600-ton, refrigerated cargo ship, Green Lily, glide past him out of the harbour entrance, the harbour master must have wondered if her skipper’s determination to resume his voyage in such weather would come back to haunt him. As soon as she turned south into the still relatively sheltered Bressay Sound, her bow began to ride up the 15ft swells and lurch heavily into the trough beyond. The forecast had left no one in any doubt that Shetland was about to experience a storm that even its gale-hardened locals might consider extreme.

  By 8am in the morning of November 19 1997, the wind, a south-easterly Force 10 to 11, was showing that it could and would live up to its billing. It came screaming off the North Sea, sending salt spray high over the rocky headlands, pummelling the grass-covered inland wastes with outraged fury and goading breakers the size of town halls on towards their destruction against the granite cliffs of Shetland.

  To be at sea that day in any vessel would be an ordeal and there were certainly some who wondered what the Croatian captain and 14-man crew of the Green Lily were going through just then. They found out all too soon. At 8.45am her skipper informed the Shetland Coastguard that he had developed engine problems and was about 14 miles south east of Lerwick, drifting back towards Bressay at about 2 knots.

  There was still time to save the ship with tugs if her engines could not be re-started. Two were tasked for immediate response, the 124ft Tystie from the Sullom Voe terminal and the 209ft Gargano from Lerwick. A third, the Maersk Champion, would set out later from Lerwick once she had discharged a cargo. Hewitt Clark was relieved to hear that neither the lifeboat nor the Coastguard rescue helicopter were required but he did not envy the tug skippers their task.

  The Gargano was first to arrive on the scene at 11.15am and immediately set about passing a tow line to the cargo ship which was wallowing in the mountainous swell, still without power. A little more than half an hour later the tug was able to radio that she had the ship in tow and was heading for Dales Voe base, north of Lerwick where she would rendezvous with the Tystie. Then, 50 minutes later, the Gargano’s master came on the radio again to say that the tow line had parted and that it would take him at least another hour to get the Green Lily once more under tow. This time lives were seriously at risk; the freighter was considerably closer to a lee shore now and there was no alternative but to scramble Rescue Lima Charlie, the Coastguard Sea King helicopter, and to ask Lerwick lifeboat to put out.

  Both helicopter pilot and lifeboat coxswain knew, even if their job was just to stand by, that they and their craft would be unlikely ever to face a more challenging battle with the elements. Every member of the six-man lifeboat crew was strapped into their seat inside the wheelhouse as Hewitt Clark took the lifeboat at no more than ten knots out of Bressay Sound to take on the full force of the gale.

  They were meeting the Force 11 winds and 40ft waves head on as they proceeded south east to clear Bard Head, the southern tip of Bressay. Time was of the essence as the casualty, still not under tow, was reported to be only a mile-and-a-half from the shore. However, it was not until he turned eastwards with the seas now on his beam, that Hewitt Clark could open the throttles. He was delighted to see how well his new Severn class coped with the weather, even at 20 knots. In the distance he could see the rescue helicopter stationary in the sky and he knew she must be over the casualty. He could also hear the Coastguard urgently asking the master of the Green Lily to be ready to release the anchors and to prepare as many of his crew as possible for evacuation.
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  By now it was about 1.40pm and the second tug, Tystie, had arrived. She wasted no time in working her way down wind towards the freighter’s bow and successfully passing a heaving line to the two men working on her foredeck. But more precious minutes were then wasted as the men struggled to haul the heavy towing line aboard by hand, instead of using the windlass. They were still trying to get the line aboard when the lifeboat arrived on scene. The coxswain and crew could see the two figures waltzing crazily about the deck as their ship, beam on to the 40ft seas, rolled violently, seemingly determined to shake off her tether.

  At last a third man was sent forward to assist with the desperate tug-of-war and eventually together they heaved the tail of the tow line aboard and made it fast. The line of white spray marking the shore was now alarmingly close and the seas which broke over the Green Lily were stacking up higher than ever as they met waves reflected off the shore. The Tystie had not even begun to put weight on the tow line before a mammoth sea lifted the freighter’s bow high to port while the tug pitched in the opposite direction. The strain on the line was too great and it snapped.

  This was the moment that Hewitt Clark and Captain Norman Leask, the helicopter pilot, knew that they were no longer spectators but lead players in the drama unfolding. The ship was less than a mile from the rocks and it was imperative she let go her anchors immediately. But where was the urgency on board? In spite of strong advice coming from the lifeboat, it was another 15 minutes before the starboard anchor eventually rattled into the water.

  The single anchor brought the ship’s head round into the wind and reduced the drift but did not halt it entirely. It was quite obvious by her violent motion and the seas breaking over her that a helicopter rescue was out of the question. Hewitt Clark began to weigh up whether his chances were any better. He knew that he would have to give it a go. Any approach would have to be on the lee side of the ship, even if that meant manoeuvring in the ever-decreasing space between the casualty and the shore. He could not help remembering how the coxswain of the Penlee lifeboat had been faced with a similar situation back in 1981 when everyone lost their lives; but at least this was in daylight and he had a much more nimble boat.