coast HISTORY
In the age of sail the RNLI was founded to save lives at sea – 140,000 people to date. As the charity nears its 200th birthday, coast explores its long history of innovation and selfless spirit
Picture Salcombe on the Devon coast during a stormy night last December. Horizontal rain lashes down and icy, gale-force winds howl. At 4am, the jangling beeps of vibrating pagers awaken Salcombe RNLI coxswain, Chris Winzar and his crew from their sleep. Someone is in trouble. Turns out a 45ft yacht with two men on board is aground and at risk of breaking up on the rocks north of Start Point, a greenschist headland stretching into the sea. Arriving at the lifeboat station within minutes, the crew throw on their yellow Helly Hansen kit and red lifejackets ready to board The Baltic Exchange III, a Tamar-class, all-weather lifeboat. It’s pitch black, there’s low to no visibility and the wind and waves battle each other in the ebb tide, thrashing with liquid confusion. This far inshore the water is too shallow to approach the yacht, which is trapped in a tight gully, so there are two choices: go home or deploy the Y boat.
The Y boat is a small inflatable daughter craft carried by the lifeboat. Chris quickly weighs up the risks and benefits – it could puncture on the rocks, the prop might ground, but two sailors need saving and two crew members volunteer to attempt the rescue. Launching from the heaving lifeboat, the crew approach to find the yacht’s bow semi-submerged and, aided by a Coastguard team shining light down from the clifftop, they recover the soaking casualties. With considerable skill, they manoeuvre the heavily laden Y boat back to the larger vessel. Dawn breaks and, at 7am, the exhausted crew and casualties finally reach dry land. ‘It was good for the whole station,’ says Chris, simply happy that on the night his crew were able to deploy all their knowledge, training and experience to make a successful rescue.
HIGH SEAS MENACE
Every year, the RNLI attends thousands of call-outs like this across the 238 lifeboat stations spanning the coastlines of the UK and Ireland. In 2021, the volunteer organisation launched 8,868 times, aided 12,903 people and saved 408 lives. But it wasn’t always like this. Back in the 18th and early 19th centuries, when Britain was a major naval power, shipwrecks were a part of life, with a yearly average of 1,800 around our coastline. After witnessing the wreck of HMS Racehorse off the Isle of Man in 1822 and many other shipwrecks before that, Manx resident and philanthropist Sir William Hillary determined to do something about it. Hillary sent a pamphlet to the Royal Navy, ministers and prominent citizens detailing
