The crew and first day

After outlining the situation here, I thought I should present the crew. First is Mo Chara (my friend in Gaelic), she is an ex RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution) Atlantic 75. She is     a 7.5m  inshore lifeboat with a maximum speed of 33 knots, normally a crew of three and the capability of carrying 20 casualties at a push. She is a bit of an old lady now, requiring a bit of TLC but serviceable and sturdy. 

Mo Chara

 The current crew, in its entirety, is made up of ex Atlantic College students. Atlantic College, which I attended,  is an international college for 16 to 18 year olds, based in South Wales, created by Kurt Hahn, amongst others. The ethos of the college is service and international understanding. The student body is made up from over 100 different countries. It was created just after the Cuban Missile Crisis to ensure that young people lived, learned and did community service together, thereby seeing that people are people, no matter where they're from. One of the community services up till 2012 was the lifeboat station crewed by students. I was asked to be a helm (skipper) at the age of 18 because I came back every year, for six years, in the summer to work at a summer camp for disadvantaged and disabled groups. All the crew here were once crew on that lifeboat. I graduated the longest ago and the youngest graduated last year.  The current coordinator is Max. He quit his job to do this one. He put out a call through the AC social media channels for volunteers and has had a steady stream ever since. Adam was the year below Max. He started up a magazine in Bristol and has left that for 3 weeks to be crew. Bill, a Texan, graduated in 2012, studied at Yale and has come to us from working in the refugee camps in Athens. Mary (who left this morning) has just gone to volunteer with a group called Cadus, running boats off a large mother ship somewhere in Italian waters, doing the same job. As you can see, we are a diverse bunch, all of whom in their own ways have answered Hahn’s “call to serve".

Cooking dinner before our pre-patrol sleep

Yesterday (Tuesday 9th), as I said in the last blog, we had to take the boat down 19Nm to the port of Thermis to get the boat taken out of the  water for the depth sounder to be refitted, the antenna to be changed etc. The run down took about an hour. The Atlantic 75 is the boat on which I learnt how to be a lifeboat crew and helm so getting back into the seat was like going home. 

This morning we woke up at 0330 and were on the boat ready to go at 0345. We started the patrol by doing a slow sweep down the coast to the lighthouse. While on this sweep we kept an eye on the shore to make sure that no boats had landed earlier. We got to the point on which the lighthouse stands and said hello to the MSF (Medecins Sans Frontieres) spotters over the radio. From there we made our way out to sea to about 0.5 Nm from the Turkish border. There we killed our engines and floated, bobbing, listening and looking for refugee boats. We watched and listened, on the radio, to the coastguard, Frontex, NATO boats patrolling the same area. 

Every flash, shape or sound that was slightly unusual we homed in on with the night vision binoculars or went to have a look at. There was no activity in our area but 20Nm south a small boat was picked up. At about 0530 the sky started to lighten towards the East and the air became a little cooler. As the sea became steel coloured and the sky pinker, our eyes started to pick out larger waves thinking those might be boats. At 0800 we stood down and headed for home. By the time we were alongside and had washed her down and debriefed it was too warm for the windproof I was wearing. 

In the next blog I'll describe some of the vessels that the refugees come across in and describe some of the things that I have been learning about this situation.