There was a discussion at the AGM about how we could help the coastguard service, who keep watch over the passage of any boat requesting this service. Some form of identification seems essential if one wishes to be recognised: some suggested that a list of DCA boats might be helpful, but I failed to see (and still fail to see) how this could be of any convenience when our boats are scattered in ones and twos around the coast. If people want to use the coastguard service they must make their own arrangements. This is not to deny that identification — sail number or prominently painted name — is valuable to avoid confusion even when a boat is not being watched for specifically.

Another matter for discussion is the use made by amateurs of the lifeboat service. It used to seem to me indefensible that a voluntary organisation should be left to shoulder the important work of rescuing professional seamen and passengers in commercial craft. Now that so much of the work of the RNLI deals with amateurs, perhaps the argument is rather different. Certainly, if rescue were run by a government organisation we should be in imminent danger of needing licences to sail at all. The lifeboat service gives its time ungrudgingly to amateur and experienced professional seamen alike. Perhaps because their crews are unpaid they have the right to criticise. It seems to me that those of us who indulge in pleasures which can become dangerous should be responsible for our own safety. Clubs usually see to this where racing is concerned. Unfortunately, there is not the historical link between lifeboat service and yachtsman that there is between, for example, mountain rescue team and the climbing fraternity. This is a pity. We might try to make the link closer by giving greater support, financial and otherwise.

We might also put the emphasis on safe sailing rather than on carrying every possible kind of apparatus for calling out the lifeboat. Commander Middleton in the June 1969 number of The Lifeboat says that “by far the greater number of yachtsmen and dinghy sailors needing assistance were fully experienced.” He does not say what “fully experienced” means. I have made a rough analysis of 44 rescues taken at random from the April 1970 number of The Lifeboat. Of the boats involved, 2 were in no trouble, 2 were commercial craft in genuine need of help, 2 were not boating accidents — bathers and cliff scramblers — 7 were yachts genuinely in the sort of trouble the best of us might sometimes meet, 12 rescues were not described in such a way as to enable me to judge the real cause of the difficulties, and the remaining 19 rescues involved an element of incompetence. Some were rowing boats which had left harbour on exposed coasts in deteriorating weather. Some had to be brought back in calm weather because of their inability to wait for the tide to float them off sandbanks. No less than 10 had relied on engines which broke down and which they could not repair — many of these were small boats carrying no oars, Some seem simply to have lacked anchor and warp.

One I thought particularly shameful was the case of the club race of the Little Orme — the guard boats could not cope and asked for help. Had they paid a fat subscription in advance? If not, why were the dinghies allowed to race in a squally SW wind and rough sea with an inadequate safety fleet?

We should not rely on those willing volunteers to rescue us from our folly. We should avoid the folly in the first place.

The Secretary (YLA) at the RNLI, 42 Grosvenor Gardens, SW1 will send you a membership form if you wish to support the Yachtsmen’s Lifeboat Supporters Association.