For a moment it seemed time was repeating itself, as on both Monday and Tuesday evening we heard the familiar tone of our pager at exactly 17:52hrs. In our usual fashion the crew finished what they were doing, well dropped everything, and make their way to the boathouse.
Slightly unusually the page alert we heard on Monday evening was the more sedate message tone and not the urgent bleating alert we normally hear which left some of us scratching our heads. Luckily a quick look at the message made it clear that there was indeed a launch request.
With the Mersey safely launched several minutes later a few waifs and strays remained as shore crew to re-house the boat. On realising that the shout was going to be sometime as the recovered yacht had to be towed to calmer waters in Poole, Gav and I were deployed on the tea run to stock up on milk and biscuits only to receive another page whilst in the shop! We were understandably confused to read another launch request for our ALB that was already at sea…..needless to say all was not what it seemed and on return to the boathouse we found out that it was in fact just a test page, as our duty DLA Russ' pager was not working correctly!
By strange coincidence the next evening followed a similar course of events. This time the services of the ILB were requested at 17:52, the boat was launched and the remaining crew returned to their business only to be paged for ‘immediate readiness of the ALB’ just 17 minutes later. This instance was a valid call, although we were stood down as fortunately the windsurfer we were preparing to search for was found safe in Studland bay.
Thankfully Wednesday did not follow the same trend and the only thing being the same was the miserable weather, wind, rain and more wind. In case you have forgotten here is a reminder of a summers day!!
Sunny Swanage just a couple of weeks ago!
No comments:
Post a Comment