Lost and found

So last night was an inspectors exercise. We had the pleasure of going to sea with a very full boat which included our Divisional Inspector Adrian Carey and a colleague who is on the crew of a lifeboat on the North Island of New Zealand. He has recently won their award for volunteer of the year and has been rewarded with a trip to the UK to spend some time with the RNLI to see how we do things over here. Judging by our brief conversation, he has been mightily impressed by all that he has seen.

As part of the exercise we put in our 'special marker buoy' at the start of the exercise and then searched for it at the end. In fact we found it pretty easily and then re-deployed it for the final half hour of the exercise so that we could have another look once it had got dark. Worryingly we then struggled to find it! Once we had recovered it, it turned out that the lifejacket light on the top of it had malfunctioned. Indeed the only way we found it was by a brief flash in the dark as one of the search lights caught some of the 'retro-reflective' tape and made a flash. For me it highlighted the value of 'retro-tape' and demonstrated just how effective it can be in helping searchers to locate their caualty.

All good...