Jim Roberts on Saving Lives at Sea
Lisa: Jim, there must have been many people of the years that you’ve helped, saved their lives. Were you or your team shown gratitude for what you’d done for people?
Oh yes, on many occasions, possibly on a couple of occasions come to memory. One was rescuing a dog that had gone over Culver Cliff and returning to his owner who happened to be the owner of a well-known local Zoo in Sandown and he kindly came along a day or so later and presented us each with a free ticket to go in to the Zoo.
But I think probably the one that mostly stands out in my mind was again a rescue of another dog and this time quite a large Alsatian dog and it had actually fallen into the moat around Bembridge Fort. If you know Bembridge Fort in the middle of Bembridge Down, that has a brick lined moat which is 40 feet deep.
Now, that is fine but over the years, part of that there is now brambles and bushes and that have grown up in the bottom of the moat and this dog had actually fallen or ran and fallen into the moat but luckily hadn’t fallen against the brick bottom but was being held up by some of the bramble bushes, so we were called and we basically decided that we would treat it as a cliff rescue although we were going down a wall and Martin Groom was the actual what we call ‘cliff man’.
He went down over and the problem with an Alsatian is, how do you bring it back up.
Normally, we have what they call ‘animal bags’ which you can put the animal in but there was no way this was going to work for a very large Alsatian. You try and put an Alsatian into anything when you’re dangling on the end of a rope in the middle of a thorn bush.
It isn’t going to happen, so Martin decided that his only best bet was to get hold of this somewhat frightened Alsatian and he actually put the Alsatian over his shoulders and held it with both legs and then the team actually pulled him up to the top of the moat wall, at which point we managed to take the dog off him and allow him to get onto firmer land.
He got out of his what’s it. By this time the dog had run off over to his owner who was quite a large lady in a fur coat, and she stayed there for a bit and then she shouted out, could I say thank you to who brought him up.
So, we said, “Go on Martin, that’s you, over you go” and he went over to speak to her and at this point she opened her big fur coat, grabbed him and gave him hug for rescuing her dog.