Eastbourne lifeboat by Ashley Bird
Above: All weather boat
Above: The team
Above: In shore boat
Above: Mark Sawyer
Above: The inshore lifeboat
Sussex Life
For most of us, Sunday mornings are usually about little more than copious amounts of coffee, wrestling with the 34 supplementary magazines that fall out of your average newspaper and perhaps gazing idly at the morning’s television. Unless you’re involved in lifeboats yourself, you’re likely to be completely oblivious to the fact that out on the water, three Sundays of every month, a crew of brave volunteers are training to save our lives, should we find ourselves floating in the English Channel.
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Today, I’ve been invited to join the Eastbourne Lifeboat crew for their training session, but looking out at the crisp, clear blue skies and calm waters by the Sovereign Harbour Marina this morning I’m wondering how the team will train in conditions that seemed too gentle to provide any ‘thrills’. Of course, I know nothing of the sea – I come from Derby, the city furthest from the coast of any in Britain – and as it turns out it’s this sort of naiveté that gets inexperienced sailors into trouble in the first place.
Second Coxswain Mark Robinson accompanies me on a dinghy from the slipway by the Lifeboat House, out to the Royal Thames, the Mersey Class All Weather Lifeboat
hat has faithfully served the local waters since 1993. It gets called out on average once a week – Eastbourne is consistently in the top five busiest stations in the UK. The distinctively decorated orange and blue boat is smaller than you’d imagine – with a narrow deck around the sides, a small area to stand at the back and a cramped navigation room downstairs. A crew of seven mans the boat for call outs but on today’s training session there are 11 of us.
Coxswain Mark Sawyer guides the boat out of the marina and hands over to crewman David Love, who – in motoring terms – ‘puts his foot down’. Suddenly we’re off, bouncing along at 16 and-a-half knots and the flexible ropes around the side of the boat don’t seem so reassuring anymore. I stand at the back of the boat, where there are metal barriers to grip, but I still feel remarkably precarious – surely I should be strapped in or something? Then I notice crewmen standing happily on the front deck or making their way up and down the sides of the boat and realise I’ve got to pull myself together. The fact that we’re
only ten minutes into the session and I already feel a little queasy isn’t helping. The thought ‘I must not be sick in front of these people’ pops into my head for the first – but not the last – time today.
The Man in charge
Mark Sawyer has been the coxswain since 2001, having worked his way up from shore hand in the early ‘90s to take over the main role. He is one of only two full-time lifeboatmen in Eastbourne and his job is not only to take charge of rescue operations, but also to ensure the boat is maintained and the crew are fully trained. Of course, the RNLI under which Eastbourne Lifeboat is governed is a charity and so relies on donations from the public. This means Mark also has to engage in PR and talk up the work that the crew do to ensure the money keeps coming in. He’s very good at it. “This is a great bunch of people, who are all in it for the right reasons because they’re voluntary,” he says. “We all get a great deal of satisfaction from the job. It’s great to be able to assist people. When you bring someone in and they say ‘thanks for helping us’, that’s the best bit of doing this.”
Click here to read the full article in the Sussex Life digital archive
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