Saturday 21 July 2007

Cutting Edge

"I've always wanted to go to Switzerland and see what the army does with those wee red knives" - Billy Connolly

As you'd expect, there's a variety of cutting tools readily available on board a Lifeboat, strategically placed to be fairly close to hand should the urge to chop something arise.

Common to both ILB and ALB is a pretty ordinary looking knife like this one...







It's a good piece of kit - sharp end, blunt end, light smearing of grease, job done.






On the ILB transom we keep a purposeful looking rope cutter.







No pointy bits for some reason...




But the real reason for this post is to introduce this frightening piece of equipment which is used to extricate unfortunate vessels from fishing nets and so on. Like the infamous Ghurker's Khukri, it's unusual for this bit of kit to be stowed away without someone's blood being spilt.


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