Yarmouth RNLI tasked twice in twelve hours

At 5pm on Sunday afternoon, pagers sounded for Yarmouth RNLI crew to aid a ten metre RIB with two crew on board who were drifting west of Hurst Castle due to an electrical failure of their engine.

The all-weather RNLI lifeboat 17-25 ‘Eric and Susan Hiscock ‘Wanderer’’ arrived on scene just before 5:30pm, assessed the situation and made contact with the casualties on board who requested to be taken back to Lymington.

Yarmouth lifeboat began the passage towing the casualty vessel and the decision was made to then launch Lymington RNLI, who arrived shortly after 6pm and the tow was transferred to them.

Yarmouth RNLI returned to Yarmouth Harbour at 630pm and after the post recovery checks were marked as ready for service.

The second shout came early Monday morning at 445am where reports from HM Solent Coastguard came through that Channel 16 (which is used for emergency communication to Coastguard) was being blocked by an open microphone.

Yarmouth all-weather lifeboat launched and used its radio directional finding capability to locate the source of the transmission.

Once Yarmouth RNLI had left its berth in Yarmouth Harbour, they followed the signal west through the Solent and located a yacht near the Needles Lighthouse, Alum Bay.

Yarmouth RNLI crews made contact with those on board, checked that all was well and then asked that they checked all their radios on board.

It was then found that their main radio was faulty, and was unfortunately stuck on transmit.

Luckily, the vessel had other radios available to use, so isolated the faulty set and continued on their passage.

Channel 16 was then cleared and normal Coastguard operations on this channel.

Yarmouth RNLI returned to Yarmouth in the beautiful early morning sunshine and were marked as ready for service once again at 6am.

Notes to editors

• Photos attached of Yarmouth Lifeboat returning to Yarmouth during a routine exercise earlier this month.
• Yarmouth RNLI Lifeboat 17-25 Eric and Susan Hiscock ‘Wanderer’ came into service in 2001, prior to that Yarmouth RNLI had an Arun Class Lifeboat 52-08 Joy and John Wade which was in service for 23 years.
• 2025 marks Yarmouth Station's 101st year in service.

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