This year, the RNLI is celebrating its 200th birthday and one of the things they’re doing to mark the occasion is to hold a Lifeboat Festival in Poole, the RNLI’s headquarters. There’s a lot of fun stuff going on this coming weekend but you can actually do quite a lot of it in your own time. Admittedly, I believe all the Lifeboat Festival events are free but I think £7 for the Discovery tour of the College is a pretty reasonable price and you can tick off visiting the engine workshop, most of the Lifeboat Shout Experience and – if you’re really lucky and happen to be there while a crew is training – even the capsize demo. I did it just over a fortnight ago and I highly recommend it.
The RNLI College opened in Poole in 2005 and there’s a lifeboat course held here which you have to pass before you can serve on a lifeboat. It takes a week or ten days and prospective lifeboat crewmembers come from all over the UK and Ireland (yes, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution is present in Ireland) so there’s accommodation and when they’ve got spare rooms, they open them up as hotel rooms so you can come and stay here too.
The Engine Workshop
The first stop on the Discovery Tour is the ground floor of the Sea Survival Centre, where there are workshops – gleaming clean workshops. We only saw two rooms but I know there are more. The first is the hydraulics room. It’s not enough to just pull people out of the sea – you have to know how to look after your lifeboat. Most people who volunteer for their local lifeboat station aren’t engineers so you come here to learn to become one. In fact, if you want to become an engineer, you can do worse than volunteer on a lifeboat and do your apprenticeship here. I’m not sure exactly what Evelyn the tour guide meant by “apprenticeship” – is this an actual apprenticeship or just part of your week/ten days?
There are four or five workstations around the hydraulics room and each has a set of “breadboards”, which are just vertical grids that you can hang your hydraulic components on and you have to make a working system from them. There’s also a larger pre-made demo board to show how the steering wheel, or electronic system, connects to the rudder via hydraulics. Then you go through into the next room and this is the engine room. They have a set of engines around the room – one for each of their current lifeboats, a couple of discontinued ones and a few others. The discontinued Tyne-class engine is also commonly used in commercial watercraft so there’s one of those engines because it’s often handy for lifeboat crews to be able to help out stricken craft rather than simply evacuate them. And there’s also a tractor engine because lots of lifeboats are launched on a trailer on the back of a tractor, and you have to keep your tractor in working order.
A few fun facts about the new Shannon-class lifeboats: they’re the only engines that have no propellors, they’re entirely jet engines – basically oversized jetskis – which drag three-quarters of a ton of water through them per second. They burn 20l of fuel per nautical mile at full speed (the previous generation was more like 26l of fuel per nautical mile) and said full speed is 32 knots although generally they get around at more like 25 knots. Despite this, if they slam the jet engines into reverse, they can stop in just two boat lengths, which is just a smidge over 27 metres.
We got through so much and I can only scribble so much on my phone but there are shiny new Mercedes engines going into older lifeboats – it costs £26m for a new all-weather lifeboat but they can refit with a better engine and new equipment for just £3m. I can’t remember which boat it is. It’s not the Shannons because we’ve already looked at their engines. It’s not the Merseys and Tynes because they’re being discontinued. I think it’s the Severns, which are the really big ones.
Sea survival pool
Next up – literally, it’s upstairs – was the training pool. “What’s so exciting about a swimming pool?” Evelyn asks rhetorically. “Well, it’s not just a swimming pool. It’s a swimming pool with teeth.”
The 25m training pool is 4m deep, it’s where all would-be lifeboat crew have to learn the water elements of their job and they can generate a force 8 storm in here. The water level is a metre below the poolside to allow space for waves and they use four enormous fans, eight wave machines, a high-powered hose and four big speakers to create waves, swell, rain, wind noise and thunder. Plus they turn off all the lights and close the blackout blinds so you have to practice this in pitch darkness. When they’re not doing that, you can climb up the viewing platform outside and look in. The windows are slightly reflective so it’s not obvious from the outside but if you press your nose against the glass, you can see in, and they’ve put a set of steps up there specifically for the purpose.
The pool is neither heated nor cooled – it’s unrealistic to train in warm water but it also costs money and there’s no sense in using the RNLI’s funds on changing the temperature of the pool. The “rain” from the high-pressure hose, on the other hand, is 2°C – not something you want hitting you in the face but in the name of preparing for rescues at sea, someone almost certainly will spray you directly in the face at some point in your training. Whatever the hideous conditions generated in this pool, the open sea will be worse.
They keep a few B-class and D-class inshore lifeboats, the inflatable ones, on the side of the pool. I gather these are boats that have passed their operational life but are still perfectly fine for training purposes. There’s crane over the pool to launch and capsize the big B-classes and it can also be used to practice helicopter rescues. When everything’s fired up, the entire room is pretty much flooded with the violence of the artificial storm. Of course, the pool is largely about practicing everything you need to know on the water but it’s also about fear management.
The first thing you have to do is practice abandoning ship. Leaping out of the little lifeboats is one thing but you also have to be prepared to abandon the larger things you might be rescuing from so there’s a platform above the pool and you have to leap 4m into the water in your drysuit from there. Many prospective lifeboat crew can’t do it. I know I couldn’t.
International work
We paused outside the simulator room to watch a couple of short videos. The first was on the pool in use, so we got to see capsize practice (I wondered how you right a B-class, because it’s a pretty big inflatable; it has a self-righting mechanism, although it looked like you have to swim underneath to activate it) and people jumping in and a certain amount of storminess. I guess they’re limited to how much of a big storm they can film without ruining the cameras.
Then there was a video on the RNLI’s work overseas. The RNLI is a world-leader in all things lifeboat and lifesaving and organisations all over the world want their help and advice. The thing is – and this gets talked about a lot – the issue of money. Because the RNLI is an entirely self-funded (via donations) charity, the Charity Commission scrutinises their funds. Money that is given by the public in the UK is expected to be used on lifeboats in the UK, probably even at the very station where it’s given and so the RNLI ethically cannot use that money on projects abroad. There are grants and bursaries and some countries will just pay themselves for the services they require. On a similar note, they can’t use donations expected to go to the frontline on their 200th anniversary celebrations, so that came from a separate pot and is not funded by you dropping your change in a box at your local station.
Back to the international work. The RNLI features at lifeboat symposiums, it runs educational campaigns, it trains lifeguards, it trains lifeboat crews and it sells retired lifeboats to other countries. Ours are state of the art. If we can replace them with a newer, better lifeboat, we will. Many of the retired ones are perfectly functional, they’re just not as good as the newer ones. So the ones that are in a fit state – and many of them end their lives because they’re damaged – are sold, often abroad. South America apparently likes the Merseys and Iceland likes the Trents. I’ll definitely have to keep an eye out for ex-RNLI Trents next time I’m in Iceland.
At this point, Evelyn asked for two volunteers. I’d noticed a sign under the TV so I jumped up.
The simulator
Yes, we were going into the lifeboat simulator and I guessed that the two volunteers were going to get a go and I was right!
Although Poole, being a shallow harbour, only has B- and D-class inshore lifeboats, I was going to get a go at driving one of the all-weather lifeboats, which are the big enclosed ones. It’s actually a slightly out-of-date model but it’s good enough for a try. We were told to go one into the left seat, one into the right and as I was on the left, I got that one and that was also a good choice because I was to be the helmsman – the driver. The other volunteer was the coxswain, whose job in this case was basically to be a spotter. I’m sure there’s more to the job in real life.
I had to drive the boat out of a simulation of Dover Harbour, dodging US coastguard ships, dinghies, cruise ships, cross-Channel ferries etc and out to where two container ships had crashed and were on fire. Getting out of the harbour was one thing – Evelyn had pointed to the steering wheel and then immediately moved onto the… I don’t even know what they’re called, the two little levels that function as accelerator and brake, I guess. There are two of them, one for each engine, so you usually use them together but you can push one up and one down to turn and being a boat, it goes in the opposite direction to the way you push up. I comprehend that in a kayak but not in a great big boat. Luckily, I mostly just used them to control our speed and not actually for steering because steering wheel. A little extra pressure: if I crash into anything, the programme freezes and Evelyn doesn’t have time to reset it in the time we have on the tour. So don’t hit the harbour wall.
When I’m driving, I know not to do the big dramatic turns on the wheel but it’s harder in a boat where it reacts a little more slowly, so the group was yelling over my shoulder as we zigzagged out of the harbour but then it got easier – well, I’d got the hang of the steering but the weather immediately turned bad. Massive waves, rain, all sorts of craft getting in my way, two ships on fire. The simulator is capable of capsizing (apparently they’ve only done it twice in the last five years) and I was pretty convinced that part of the fun of this was that I would capsize it but miraculously, my boat stayed upright as we drove around the chaos picking up casualties from the water – that is, we came up close to them and I had to stop engines because to grab them while it’s moving would tear someone’s arm off.
If there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that I’m not cut out to be crew on a lifeboat! Shore crew, maybe. I can launch and clean the boats and let the sea crew do the actual lifesaving. I mean, I couldn’t, I don’t live close enough to a station. The aim is to launch within ten minutes of the pagers being activated and I’d still be twenty to thirty minutes away by then.
The ALC
Our last stop was through the Slipway Cafe:Bar which is a cafe upstairs out the back, overlooking Poole Harbour. Downstairs is the Riggers Restaurant – both open to the public. We were here to look out at the view because from here, you can see the back of the All-Weather Lifeboat Centre. Since 2014, the RNLI have built their all-weather lifeboats here. Previous to that, they were put out to tender to commercial boatbuilders but now it’s all in-house. Sunseekers, luxury yacht-makers are next door and they tend to share staff, facilities and expertise, so when Sunseeker realised they weren’t going to get to buy this site, they gave a donation to help the RNLI buy it because it would be mutually beneficial.
My next post will be on my tour of the ALC but for now, we got to see a sample of every current lifeboat moored outside, including the training lifeboat, a variant on a model no longer in use. It’s painted in blue and grey rather than orange because they don’t want it to be recognisable as a lifeboat – it doesn’t have the lifesaving equipment on board and although they’ll handle an emergency if they’re passing, it’s not really a lifeboat and shouldn’t be seen as such. There are also some other crafts – they have a small sailing yacht to teach crews how to handle masted crafts with rigging, since it’s something they’re likely to encounter. There are other small motorboats and boards etc used by beach lifeguards, one of the E-class inshores used on the Thames, and a set of the smaller inshore lifeboats which come here to be serviced. They’re built at the other facility on the Isle of Wight.
And that was it for the tour! It’s advertised as 90 minutes but this one lasted the best part of two hours. I had no idea how much you could see on the tour – I had no idea how much lifeboat crews are expected to do! And this doesn’t cover any first aid, which I know exists because 1) common sense and 2) it’s listed as a demo on the Lifeboat Festival’s website. Interestingly, there’s a Lifeboat Shout Experience available at the Festival, where you get to dress up in the kit and drive the simulator. I didn’t get to dress up or be “paged” but basically, I had this experience, and for £7 included alongside the engine workshop and visit to the pool. The Lifeboat Shout Experience is £45! It’s also sold out even as I write this, more than two weeks ago.
Yes, coming next is my visit to the all-weather lifeboat factory where I get to see the boats being built and serviced, so I’m very excited about that, and then this weekend is the Lifeboat Festival, so if you’re in the area, get down to Poole Quay.