Martin Woodward on 1987 Storm

We had the best era. We had some of the good jobs and I can think of a lot of good jobs we did which you don’t really see nowadays because safety has become such a prominent feature of Health and Safety and regulations.

Everything’s regulated up to the hilt, so you don’t get so many boats that weren’t in good condition.

Angling boats are much more regulated. We used to get a lot of angling boats, fishing boats, even ships sinking in those days but it’s very, very rare now.

I mean the last one I remember was the ‘Flag Theophano’ which was just two miles off here which killed all 19 crew. That was quite a big ship that capsized.

Lisa And when was that?

1990. You’ll probably remember the hurricane of October 1987, but that blew down a huge amount of trees on the Island as you may remember or you may not. I don’t know how old you are (laughs). And then the 1990 one was worse, it blew really hard.

We went out on a false alarm on the Lifeboat here and it was the worst we’d ever seen in the Solent. I’ve got some film of it actually that the helicopter took because the helicopter couldn’t even get off the ground, the wind was too strong and then eventually when it died down a bit they got off and they joined the search that we were involved in and they took some film. You would think that was the Southern Ocean, you wouldn’t think it was just out here by the Forts.

Sadly, as a result of that hurricane, just after that hurricane there was such a sea running that this ship sank. It was carrying bulk cement and it’s like a liquid and if you get too much movement it can shift and then capsize a ship. Doesn’t normally happen but on this particular one it did. Very sad.

It was just literally there, and we were out that night, on that same night on another job, a swimmer over at Southsea. No one knew this ship had sunk until the next morning when the Pilots reported it was missing here. It was supposed to be coming in to anchor and we probably … it had already sunk by the time we’d gone out that night but we had no knowledge. Otherwise we would have been called in to search for survivors of that, but of course no one knew it. It just went over, drowned all the crew before they could even put a mayday out.

I did a lot of diving on it for the Marine Accident people just afterwards.