Martin Woodward on Saving Lives at Sea
From the days of the ‘Jesse Lumb’ where navigation wise you didn’t have anything. You had a chart and a compass and a pencil and a parallel rule and that was about it really.
In the late ‘60s, they put a radar on the ‘Jesse Lumb’ which was a big development because you could navigate by that to a certain extent but coming through to the ‘Jack Shayler and the Lees’ I remember doing …
I ran a London Marathon and a couple of other things for raising equipment to update it because the RNLI were quite old fashioned in their acceptance of new equipment. They liked to keep to the old belts and braces methods until recent years basically, or recent decades so at that time when we wanted to put a plotter on there which is like a navigational plotter which, you know, tells you where you are basically by, in those days by beacons and nowadays by GPS by satellite, it was a bit of a struggle to get those things on board, but we did get them in the end and through the ‘80s and the ‘90s, things improved and there was better equipment on board and nowadays I mean they’ve got everything on there.
I mean they’ve got every navigational device, what they call a SIMS System which integrates everything. It’s really high tech now, so that 30-40 years, there’s a huge change in technology and also in the boats because if you remember the old boats were double enders, they were canoe shaped, sharp at both ends if you like.
That got changed with the onset of the fast boats in the ‘80s like the Time Class and others, and then they realised the potential and the value of being able to go a lot faster to get to people quicker on a rescue, so nowadays we’re up to three times the speed of the old ‘Jesse Lumb’ or the ‘Jack Shayler’.
You’re talking 25 knots now where before it was only eight knots so a lot of changes in every way in that relatively short period of time.