This Blog

I started this blog as a way of giving casual readers an idea of what we do in the Coastguard. Obviously any casualty details are removed and casualties privacy is expected and respected.

What I'd like to know is.. doe anyone read this? My photyoplog at photos.tenbycoastguard.co.uk has rather stalled of late and because it was difficult to show many calls without showing too much identifying detail I've restircted it to only calls that are reported in the press and even then I'll still only show the SAr operations and not the casualties.

With this all in mind some feedback would be great - do you find it valuable reading about a Coastguard's point of view? Even though I've been doing this for the last 11 years I still think it's a hugely valuable service we provide and am keen to promote it, but is anyone interested?

anyone?

Showtime

most of the weekend seemed to be taken up with calls - we had fallers, missing persons and searches culminating in doing a display on Sunday to hundreds of people.

On one of the calls we had a 10 year old boy who had fallen while climbing up the rocks and when we had strapped him securely into the spinal board and started to load him on to the helicopter he took one look at the air ambulance and said "actually i feel better now!"

Multi tasking

Predictably the hot weather has brought in a spate of calls, but today I found myself being pulled in two different directions as we had a call to a guy going hypoglycaemic being brought in by the lifeboat and 1 minute after being tasked to that had another call to the next town for chest pains on the beach.

As I live in town anyway I radioed in and said that I'd head down to the local beach for the hypo guy leaving the vehicle to fight its way through the holiday traffic with blue lights. As I don't have blue lights or sirens, getting through the pedestrianised area is a slow matter and I managed to pick the one road where the horse and carriage ride was travelling.

John the horse man saw me behind him and grinned and shrugged at me, he couldn't go any faster through the people and even if he pulled to one side I reckoned that he'd make better progress and was content to drive behind him for a bit and let him part the pedestrians.

The guy was quite poorly and slipping in and out of consciousness, I ferried the ambulance crews down to him and Matt the harbourmaster had the bright idea of transferring him from his boat into the lifeboat and putting the lifeboat onto its trailer to bring him back up the beach.

Unfortunately this meant wading out to help lift him from one boat to another.

We got him to the top and lifted him onto the ambulance trolley and left him to the ambulance crew.

We got back to the station to see the vehicle back from the other job and squelched through the door - Mike the station officer took one look at us wet to the waist and leaking seawater from our boots and said "Yes! We picked the right job!"

Flares never go out of fashion

Just getting ready for bed and the pager went to assist our flank team with orange lights seen in the sky.

Distress flares are always red and whenever we get a report of orange or white flares it's always fireworks or the military. Recently we have had a spate of calls for thai fire lanterns.

as this call was orange lights my first thought was fire lanterns.

On arrival at Manorbier we spread out and did a sweep of the beach area, the full moon and mild night meant that although it was gone 12am, the sounds of the sea and the wild bunnies running away from our bouncing torches made for quite a pleasant walk.

As we were walking back, above the cliffs to the west we saw a huge burst of bright orange light, we reported this in and redeployed further down the coast to see if we could triangulate it, a 10 minute journey to the next bay ensued giving us a chance to chat about life, work and which episode of buffy is best (don't ask).

On arrival at the next bay our colleagues reported seeing the flares again, but we couldn't, a brief discussion with a group of revellers on the beach turned up nothing.

Turns out the military were firing flares off the range at Castlemartin and hadn't told anyone, we finally got home at around 2;30 am and I slept right through my alarm for work this morning.

A Rollicking good time

We were woken at about 8 am on Sunday to the pager going off to a report of a dinghy found floating off Lydstep. This was about half an hour before my wife's alarm goes off for work so she was not best pleased. Fortunately on arrival the rest of the team looked as half asleep as me with the exception of Jason who was due to start work at 8 anyway. Kyle commented that I had a proper 'bed head' and said that he half expected to see a slice of toast stuck to my face.

The dinghy was recovered to the shore and it appeared to have had one of its oars snapped in its rowlock, which is pretty hard to do at sea (see below)

The Police arrived on scene and let us know that the previous night a group of youths broke into the sports store on site and stole bows and arrows and proceeded to shoot the inflatables in the boat yard with them


We located the owner of the tender and he was safe and well so all we could do was to carry out a search of the area and return to station and hope no-one turns up missing (which no-one has)

My best guess on this one is that the tender got dragged down the slip and whoever it was tried rowing it on the sand causing the oar to snap, they then abandoned it (leaving a beer can behind) an the dinghy got taken out later by the incoming tide.

Breaking waves

We rolled up last night to a report of a possible broken ankle at Manorbier bay. As we have just taken on two new recruits I hung back to give them a lift and to make sure they wouldn't suffer from the 'red mist' that tends to affect you on your first few shouts.

We made or way to Manorbier with the excitement practically rolling off them. The call itself was a pretty straightforward scoop and run with the casualty already being given entonox. My first comment to the paramedic was "why am I not surprised to see a skim-board next to him". For those of you who don't know, skim-boarding involves buying a thin, circular piece of wood which you throw into the shallows and then run after and attempt to jump on. Predictably nine times out of ten the board simply stops dead leaving the boarder to run ungainly off the stationary bit of plank into the shallows. Broken ankles, twists and sprains seem to inevitably result on the few occasions where skim boarders don't then plough out of control into the paddlers around them.

You can probably tell I'm not that much of a fan of skim boards, but I wouldn't want to spoil anyone's fun.



A skim boarder on a plank