As Gallagher surpass 20 years of providing insurance services to the RNLI, we felt it a great time to visit one of our local stations to meet long-time RNLI volunteer Dave Turnbull, RNLI Coxswain/Mechanic at Swanage RNLI.

We also get to meet Emilie Hackforth, Gallagher Marine Claims Handler, and learn about her passion for all things marine

+++

Dave Turnbull, RNLI Coxswain/Mechanic, Swanage RNLI.

Tell us a little about yourself. 

I’m married to Angela, a civil servant, who works for the Office for National Statistics. She was working for the RNLI when we met, at our regional office in Saltash. We have two children, Noah. who’s eight and a half, and Charlie, five.  We live in Swanage. I moved to Swanage with my parents when I was nine years old, having previously lived in the north in Middlesborough and then Yorkshire. I’ve always been interested in all things marine as my granddad had a small boat in Hartlepool marina. It’s always been a part of my life.

How long have you been involved with the RNLI at Swanage?

I’ve been involved for 30 years – ten years as a volunteer and just over 20 as a paid member of staff. I started as a volunteer in the winter of 1992 along with seven others, to boost the number of crew for the new inshore lifeboat. The RNLI had identified an increase in leisure activity in the bay and they wanted to trial an inshore lifeboat for the summer of 1993. At the time I was self-employed as a marine engineer servicing boat engines across Dorset.

My volunteering days ended when I applied for the full-time position of Station Mechanic as the current person in role was retiring. I’d been covering his annual leave and weekends off for some time, so I was well placed to step into the role.

Swanage Lifeboat Station is situated at the southern end of Swanage Bay. Lifeboats have been launching from here since 1875.

What does your role involve?

My title is RNLI Coxswain/Mechanic which means I get to do lots of stuff!  I am responsible for the maintenance of the boats and associated equipment and I’m also in command for the boat at sea. I help with crew training and run all that sides of things. I’m also part of the operations team for the station.

How many volunteer staff do you have?

Every lifeboat station has one or two full-time paid members of staff who are part of the crew. At Swanage RNLI, I am the only paid member of staff.

I have five Deputy Mechanics, three Deputy Coxswains and 36 lifeboat crew, all of whom are volunteers. Then there’s Rob who’s our volunteer Operational Manager plus five volunteer Launch Authorities who sit between us and the Coastguard – they are his conduit to getting the boat out and to activating the crew pagers.  We also have a Treasurer, Lifeboat Press Officers, Visit team members and Fundraisers.  So, all in all we have an amazing team of over 60 volunteers at the station.

The Visits team take care of public engagement and visitors to the lifeboat station.  We get lots of people just walking in, we’ve had about 5,000  visitors so far this year.  We’re a little bit off the beaten track so we don’t necessarily see as many as we could.

If anyone is interested in volunteering, we’d love to hear from you. We’re not currently offering any operational crew roles but we have opportunities for non-sea going roles, such as being part of the Visits team, being a Fundraiser or part of our Education team who go out to schools. We like to say that you don’t need to get wet to be a life safer! More details can be found here.

Tell us about ‘Lifeboat Week’

We hosted ‘Lifeboat Week’ in August this year (August 12 – 21).  This initiative started around the year 2000 with the purpose to try and concentrate our fundraising efforts into one week. It’s all about raising awareness of what we do, raising a bit of money, enabling people to enjoy engaging with the RNLI, share some of our messaging and have fun. It also allows different parts of the station to interact with crew members. It’s great for team building.

I think that it’s important that the crew understand how much is involved in fundraising… when putting on a £200 crash helmet, understanding where that £200 has come from. We’re fortunate in that the RNLI brand is very strong, we don’t need to necessarily explain what the RNLI does to our potential supporters. Post Covid it’s been great to return to initiatives such as Lifeboat Week.

How often does your team get called out?

In 2021 we did 64 call outs, the busiest day of the year was a Sunday and the busiest month was August. The RNLI has a curved trend of rescues – it comes up a little bit in the spring and goes back up in the summer holidays.

Most of what we deal with here is responding to leisure activity call outs, such as canoeing, climbing, coasteering, dinghies, divers, yachts, motorboats, jet skis and paddleboards. We also get involved in a few medical incidents where it might be easier to move people around by boat rather than road.

We are a charity that saves lives at sea but ‘saving a life’ is defined quite tightly by the RNLI – just because you’ve pulled someone in doesn’t mean that you’ve saved their life …we help an awful lot of people every year. Some years on paper, we might only save a handful of lives but we’ll have helped hundreds! Prevention work in the background is key and we have the Education team working in schools. We always say that in an absolutely ideal world you wouldn’t get the boat wet and that the best lifeguards on the beach are the ones that don’t get wet as they’re managing the risks on the beach well.

We understand that Swanage Lifeboat Station appeared recently on ‘Saving Lives at Sea’

Yes, last month we appeared on BBC 2’s ‘Saving Lives at Sea’ programme.  You can now watch it on BBC iPlayer, series 7 episode 2. It featured an injured climber, Polly, who we evacuated from the cliffs, near Anvil Point Lighthouse. She had been climbing with her husband and broken her ankle, suffering an open fracture. Her husband had to free climb back up the cliff with no ropes, as Polly was tied up in all the equipment, where he used the emergency telephone. She was quite a long way up the cliff and the Coastguard Rescue Team lowered her down the cliff to us where she was given pain relief, we immobilised the injury and brought her back to the station from where she was transferred by an Air Ambulance to Southampton Hospital. There’s a lovely interview from the casualty on the programme.

What investment has been made in Swanage Lifeboat Station?

The RNLI makes a big investment in equipment and boats.  £10 million was spent here in 2016, on a new boat house and a new Shannon class all-weather lifeboat – an investment which is expected to last 80 years for the building and 50 years for the boat. It’s a big investment, hence we make sure that we look after our assets.

The RNLI has a national rolling programme called the Coast Review and they go to every lifeboat station every five to six years to make sure that they have the right resources in place, to look to see what might have changed. For example, has a wind farm been built, is there a new marina, has the fishing fleet that was there 50 years ago disappeared etc?

Twitter: @swanagelifeboat

Facebook: facebook.com/swanagelifeboat

Instagram: Swanage Lifeboat Station

+++

Getting to know the team at Gallagher’s Poole-based marine practice.

Name: Emilie Hackforth

Role: Marine Claims Handler

How long have you been in the business?

Just a few weeks.

What’s your marine career background?

I started working at Parkstone Yacht Club in the sailing office during my school summer holidays back in 2018, helping with the organisation and delivery of sailing before moving over to the hospitality side.

Fast forward to finishing my A-levels last year, I joined Pip Hare’s Ocean Racing Team as an intern, working within both the office and boat team, helping with all aspects of the campaign.

What’s the best thing about your job?

The people I work with are incredible and have all taken me under their wings, answering all my questions and reinforcing that there is no such thing as a silly question.

Within the claims side I really love the variety there is, from small craft to superyachts we never quite know what we will come in next.

Use 3 words to describe yourself.

Bubbly, adventurous and ambitious.

What did you want to be when you were growing up?

Shore crew to the America’s Cup boats.

Who do you most admire?

Pip Hare and Hannah Mills, both incredible female sailors who have shown that women can compete equally with men within the sailing world.

Tell us something about yourself that we don’t know.

I sail competitively within Poole Harbour/Bay and occasionally up in the Solent, recently taking up dinghy sailing again which is a slight change from yacht racing.