There have been two calls on the Whitstable lifeboat over the last three days.
On Friday 17 August the lifeboat was launched at 12.37pm following a report of a 6ft inflatable dinghy with two children, aged 10 and 13 onboard, being blown out to sea off Leysdown, on the Isle of Sheppey. It was also reported that two males were swimming out to the craft in an attempt to retrieve it.
On arrival of the lifeboat, the crew found that a passing jet ski had rescued the two children and had taken the children and the two males back to the shore where the Sheppey Coastguard were giving safety advice to all involved.
On Sunday afternoon the lifeboat was launched just after 5.00pm when a member of the public called at the lifeboat station to express concern for a missing 10-year-old girl.
The lifeboat made an extensive search from the Neptune Public House eastwards to the Tankerton Bay Sailing Club while a lifeboat shore party and Herne Bay Coastguard searched the shoreline. Once Thames Coastguard where satisfied the area had been thoroughly searched the lifeboat was ‘stood down’ and the call put down to a false alarm with good intent.
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Notes to editors
The Whitstable lifeboat station was established in 1963 by the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and is one of 235 lifeboat stations around the shores of Great Britain and Ireland.
The volunteer crews provide a maritime search and rescue service for the Kent coast. They cover the area between the Kingsferry Bridge on the Swale, in the west, around the south-eastern side of Sheppey and along the coast through Whitstable and Herne Bay to Reculver in the east and outwards into the Thames Estuary.
The station is equipped with an Atlantic 75 lifeboat named Oxford Town and Gown in recognition of the fact that she was paid for by the people of Oxford after a fund raising campaign by the Oxford Branch of the RNLI.
She is what is known as a rigid inflatable inshore lifeboat, the boat’s rigid hull being topped by an inflatable sponson or tube. The lifeboat is 7.5m long and the twin 70hp engines give her a top speed of 32 knots with an endurance of 3 hours. She carries a crew of 3.
RNLI media contacts
• Chris Davey, Volunteer Lifeboat Press Officer, Whitstable Lifeboat Station.
07741 012004/ nativephoto@hotmail.com
• Tim Ash, RNLI Public Relations Manager (London/East/South East)
0207 6207426 / 07785 296252 / tim_ash@rnli.org.uk
• Philly Byrde, RNLI Press Officer (London/East/South East)
0207 6207425 / 07786 668825 / philly_byrde@rnli.org.uk
• For enquiries outside normal business hours, contact the RNLI duty press officer on 01202 336789