David Butler on Saving Lives at Sea
The Canberra. So, the Canberra liner, which was a Cunard boat wasn’t it?
Again, it was a foul evening and it was on the borderline with better communications. We had a mobile telephone by then, but my phone rang at home and it was Adrian, and he said, “We’ve got a boat coming ashore.”
He said, “It’s just off of Ventnor at the moment. Can you get over and get the vehicle out and see if you can find it?”
I said, “OK, right” so I rallied up a couple of other guys and we went up there and that was it … before I left the house I said, “When you say it’s a boat”
I said, “what kind of boat.”
He goes, “It’s the Canberra and it’s got 1,500 people on it.”
So, I’m thinking, ‘blimey’ that’s a bit serious. So, I said, “So what are we going to do with them then?” He goes, “I don’t know yet, let’s find the boat first.” So, we trots off to Ventnor, gets the vehicle out and the cloud was right down. I mean it’s down probably about much the same level as we are at the moment so you couldn’t see the sea. And the Needles gang had come over as well and were trotting around looking for this boat and they had no power so they couldn’t communicate.
All they had was their emergency lighting and we were up at the viewpoint car park at Leeson Road, we’d just pulled in there to have a bit of a regroup, and the cloud lifted up, just sort of like went up and the thing was right in front of us, just heading into … ‘cos this is very shallow water here. Very shallow, sandy seabed with very nasty big rocks (laughs) and this thing was sat there, and it came over the radio,
“Have you found this boat yet?” and we both went, “Yeah, it’s right in front of us.”
“What do you mean, it’s right in front of you?”
“Well, we’re at Leeson Road carpark and it’s right in front of us.” And then, “OK”
Luckily their emergency power was on and they managed to anchor it and stop it from dragging in to shore and the weather abated a bit so luckily the Canberra didn’t come ashore.
But we did have an emergency plan put in place if a boat came ashore, I had a secret box that I used to keep on the Coast Guard Station which was not to be opened unless this kind of thing happened, and of course that had been opened that evening because we thought we would need it and I think it had about 50 tags in it for tagging people as they come ashore and we were going to put them in the Winter Gardens, but with 1,500 people plus the crew (laughs) we weren’t quite sure what we were going to do with them all (laughs).
The general consensus afterwards was that the only thing you could have done was leave them on board …
Yeah, leave them on board and …
… there was nothing else you could do. Imagine winching that lot off one at a time.
