Episode 2 Saving Lives at Sea

We're an island nation drawn to the sea that surrounds us.

For many, it's a playground.

For others, it's where we earn our living.

But the sea is unpredictable.

It can change in an instant.

And when accidents happen, they happen very fast.

The sea is a dangerous place.

If you don't respect the sea, the sea will bite you.

There to save our lives is a voluntary army

of nearly 5,000 ordinary people,

ready to leave their jobs, their families, to race to our rescue.

It makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up,

to know that if it wasn't for you, that person wouldn't be here.

They rescued me.

But they also saved a mum, a daughter, a sister, a wife.

-Oh, my God!

-To see someone disappear under the water

right in front of you...

is brutal. It's absolutely horrendous.

Equipped with their own cameras...

-Is my light flashing?

-Yeah. Is mine?

..the crews give us a unique insight

into every call-out as only they see it.

There's another little wave...

Speeding through the roughest weather,

searching for people who may only have moments to live.

Can you still hear me?

For those who risk their lives, it has become a way of life.

When those pagers go off, it's life-and-death.

Lerwick in the Shetland Isles is one of the most remote lifeboat stations

in the UK.

Just 400 miles south of the Arctic Circle,

these islands lie closer to Norway than Aberdeen.

The hundreds of islets and inlets

are a haven for sea birds and wildlife,

but for the lifeboat crew, it can take a lifetime to learn them all.

Ian moved to Shetland 18 months ago,

and is still getting his head round his new area.

This is our patch, and it goes up as far as Muckle Flugga,

which is the northern part of the Isle of Unst, which is here.

There are some really bizarre names.

Fladdibister. Longa Tonga...

I don't even know if I'm pronouncing half of them right.

Shetland is part of Scotland, but it doesn't feel like it's Scotland -

it's very Scandinavian.

It's the names. It's...the accents.

I... Sometimes, when some of the crew talk to me,

I just agree with them cos I don't have a clue what they're saying.

We go to an island called Whalsay,

and I might as well be in Japan.

Although one of the remotest parts of the UK,

Lerwick's thriving fishing industry attracts workers

from all over Scotland.

Originally from Orkney,

fisherman Darren is one of Lerwick's 28 lifeboat volunteers.

Even though he's from Shetland's closest neighbour,

the difference in dialects took some getting used to for his fiancee,

local lass Gemma.

-Are you going to wipe your mouth?

-When me and Dan first met,

it was a struggle.

I could hardly understand him.

But I do now. A lot of my family still struggle.

I get told I sound Welsh.

And that I sing when I speak...

Darren spends up to two weeks at a time working on the Ocean Way -

one of Shetland's largest trawlers.

But when he's not at sea, he's ready to answer the pager's call.

More often than not, the pager will go off when I'm in bed.

Did you not go with odd shoes on one time?

Yeah. Quite often I appear down at the station with no socks on.

When Darren gets called out, it makes me nervous.

It's... I worry.

No' kennin' what they're going to.

My family...

a lot of them are fishermen.

So you're kind of always aware of what could go wrong.

When Darren does get two weeks onshore to spend with Gemma,

there's every chance their time off together will be interrupted

by the familiar call.

When the pager first went off, I was sound asleep.

I was in bed. It was a nice morning.

The sun was shining.

Not too much wind.

A nice day for a shout, if there's such a thing.

SIREN BLARES

A trawler is in trouble out at sea.

When I was running into the station, one of the guys was running out.

And he goes, "It's your boat. It's the Ocean Way."

So I ran a little bit faster.

The Lerwick crew are armed with the largest class of boat in the fleet.

Accelerating to a top speed of 25 knots,

they're heading out to the trawler Darren works on, The Ocean Way.

25 miles out at sea, she's taking on water.

I knew exactly who was aboard - my friends, my crewmates...

If I missed that shout, yeah, I wouldn't have been a very happy boy.

We went as fast as we could.

Obviously a boat sinking is never a good thing.

You want to do the best you can, to save the boat,

it's their livelihoods as well.

I phoned the skipper on the way out, just to find out what was happening.

He seemed reasonably OK.

I mean, he didn't sound panicked or anything like that.

At top speed, the Lerwick crew arrive in under an hour.

A Coastguard search and rescue helicopter and another fishing boat

are also on the scene.

The Ocean Way is taking on water through a hole below the waterline.

She was bringing her fishing gear onboard, when her hull ruptured.

They're having to use their onboard pumps to bail out the water,

hoping to stay afloat long enough to get her back to port.

When we first came alongside the Ocean Way,

It didn't look like she was... anything wrong, really.

First we thought, "No, she'll make it." She was doing nine knots.

To help bail out flooded vessels,

the lifeboat carries an emergency salvage pump.

Their priority is to get it onboard,

to help hold back the water and to assess the damage.

Darren is the obvious choice to go.

Darren knew the boat. He knew the book inside out.

So he was going to be the one that was going to transfer across

with the pump, and our crewmen to go and give him a hand.

It's only really when we got onboard

and realised you could have either situation.

There was a lot of water on board already.

There was a bigger hole than which we thought.

The pumps weren't working. There was just too much water coming in.

Even with the lifeboat's extra pump

helping shift up to 800 litres a minute,

the water's still rising.

The crew decide to use a further emergency pump,

carried by the Coastguard's helicopter.

But this means distancing themselves from the Ocean Way

while it is winched down to the lifeboat.

Back on the fishing boat,

they're losing the race against the incoming flood.

The water was coming in the scuppers,

which really means that the water's got nowhere to go.

It's coming in, but there's nowhere for it to get out.

I went up to the skipper and said, "It's not going to come back."

"Even if we got another pump, it's not going to come back."

That's definitely not good.

We're going to have to get everybody off.

Now, nearly a mile away, the lifeboat and Coastguard helicopter

is still transferring the pump, when the alarm comes in.

I was getting messages from the fishing boat,

saying that she's filling up with water,

she's filling up with water.

"We are abandoning ship. Get back here and pick up the crew."

We gunned it back to the Ocean Way.

By the time the lifeboat had had come alongside,

then we were going vertical all the time.

Yes, you're being thrown at all kinds of angles when you're at sea,

but this was very, very different.

The group get in as close as they can to pick up Darren

and the fishermen.

But the fishing boat is heading under, fast.

Get in too close, and she could take the lifeboat with her.

It was a level where she would have,

if we did hit it, it would puncture us under the waterline,

which would have meant then we would have been a second casualty.

So, we could get right alongside...

For the five fishermen and two lifeboat volunteers on board,

time and options are running out.

The boys are on the side of the boat, and in no time at all,

the water's around their feet.

I'd shout to the boys, "Jump in the water."

The engine was stopped by that time. So it was kind of eerily silent.

The sounds of me shouting, "Jump overboard. Jump overboard."

If we didn't jump,

then we were either going to get sucked in or fall into the rigging

or get trapped or something.

The skipper and the engineer, they sort of went up forward on the boat,

to jump from there, but I was too busy shouting at them to jump

that I didn't notice that the water was almost coming up to me.

So it was time I jumped as well.

Desperately trying to avoid being caught in the wreckage and dragged

under, seven men are in the water,

between the sinking 270-tonne trawler and the 42-tonne lifeboat.

We were trying to back away as much as we could.

With two boats so close together, it's the fact that a swell could

pick one boat up and push us together,

and if we've got guys in the water there, one of them could be crushed.

The skipper, he was kind of struggling a bit.

So I swam over to him.

For a while,

as hard as we were swimming, we couldn't get away from the boat.

It felt more like the boat was chasing us.

My heart's going like a machinegun.

Swimming back as fast as we can and not making any headway at all.

It's only your head above water, and you're seeing all this steel

coming towards you, that you have no control over.

The best you can hope for is just keep swimming.

Just adrenaline that day was pounding.

I mean, everything happened so fast.

I mean, we were just pulling guys out of the water.

It's like they were rag dolls, near enough.

We were just pulling them out.

I was bending down picking up two guys and I looked around to see

where the boat was going, and it was just under the water.

It just happened so fast.

But it was just... I was pretty shocked...

..to see that happen.

Never good watching a boat sink.

To see someone's livelihood, it's guys' wages, it's an income.

I'd never seen a boat sink before.

Obviously, it's the boat I work on and a good boat.

She's seen us through a lot of weather.

I never thought for one minute she'd go down.

As the Ocean Way joins the hundreds of other wrecks that litter

the Shetland seabed, her five crew members arrive home

wet and exhausted, but otherwise unharmed.

The crew were very shaken up.

I think the skipper was a little more shell-shocked than anybody,

but that's quite understandable.

I think we were all just happy, relieved.

A boat's replaceable.

Lives are not.

SIREN BLARES

From the pager's call to launching on service,

it takes on average under ten minutes

for a lifeboat to be on the water.

The volunteer crews know timing is everything,

and any delay can mean the difference between life and death.

Well, they say time and tide waits for no-one.

I think that's especially important in the RNLI.

Obviously time is...

why we do it. You know, the shorter the time,

the better chance of survival, with most casualties.

Every second is precious.

Especially, say, if you had someone in the water at that time,

you have minutes.

Time-critical shouts, you feel that time is chasing you.

I've never had the time run out.

It's come close on a couple of occasions and you think,

five, ten minutes more, and that would have been a different story.

I have lost count of the number of people

I have pulled out of the water.

But I do remember those relatively few cases

where we were too late.

To see someone disappear under the water right in front of you,

where three, four seconds earlier,

you probably could have effected a rescue, is brutal.

It's absolutely horrendous. And there's nothing you can do about it.

You beat yourself up, but there's nothing you can do, so, yeah,

very much our goal to get there in good time.

When it comes to traditional British seaside fun,

it doesn't get much better than here at Weston-Super-Mare.

Since Victorian times, any sunny summer's day

sees the population explode with day-trippers.

The coastline is a bit weird,

because the tide goes out a long way.

But it's great, you know. We've got long beaches, lots of mud, islands.

I love it round here.

I think everybody loves to go to a seaside.

And if the tide's not there, they'll walk out however far it is,

so they can have a little paddle.

Unfortunately, some people get caught out that way.

At the mouth of the Severn Estuary,

Weston is sheltered from the worst of the weather coming in from the

Atlantic. But its position here creates other dangers.

As the sea is funnelled up the narrow Bristol Channel,

it pours in across Weston's gently shelving foreshore,

creating one of the fastest-flowing tides in the world.

For the crew stationed here,

it means most shouts are a race to beat it.

The biggest danger is the speed that the tide comes in.

I mean, I remember being told this as a kid, you can't outrun the tide.

What a ridiculous thing to say - you can't outrun the tide.

Of course you can outrun the tide, it's just the water, just the sea.

In Weston, you cannot outrun the tide.

Mother Nature, she is just incredible.

And the way you can see it so clearly in Weston.

It's like the sea is just coming out of a hose,

and so it will knock you off your feet, it will be relentless.

It just doesn't stop.

You can't outrun the tide.

Weston's first lifeboat station now lies abandoned

at the end of the derelict Birnbeck Pier.

Once a popular tourist promenade,

the pier is now a trap for those unwary, unwise or unlucky enough

to be caught out by the tide.

Under the rotting boards,

the Bristol Channel is forced even faster

through the gap under the pier.

The dangers of swimming and playing around Birnbeck Island

is that when the tide's coming in or going out,

it can run up to five to six knots round that area.

It's a very fast moving body of water there,

and it can take you away very quickly.

The dangers of those waters were brought home a few years ago.

Two young lads had gone swimming.

They got into difficulties, got swept away with the current.

We could hear them when we were running across the pier

-to get the boats.

-We could hear them crying for help.

When we launched, we literally went out half a mile into the bay,

switched off the engines and shouted and never heard a soul.

The cries had gone.

Sadly, we couldn't find them.

The water's that silty,

once something or somebody goes

below the surface a couple of inches, we just can't see them.

Um, they drowned, unfortunately.

Every second can count to save a life.

We were literally a minute, two minutes away from saving two lives,

which unfortunately we didn't.

Another summer season at Weston.

The crowds have arrived along with the sunshine.

SIREN BLARES

Cries for help have again been heard from under Birnbeck Pier.

Two people have been caught by the fast-rising water.

The crew begin their race against the tide.

When I hear about people in the water in Birnbeck Pier,

I think we have got to get there,

like, five minutes ago.

Definitely a sense of emergency to get out there.

The tide was on the flood.

It started moving and I knew it was only going to get faster and faster

for the next two hours, so time is at the essence then.

The main concern for the casualty is are they still there,

are they still holding on to the legs?

One, you've got that force of water coming on to you.

Cold water.

How long do you cling on for?

How long do you keep your head above the water?

As they approach the pier, the crew spot two figures.

They are standing on horizontal struts on the metal legs.

Either side of them, the Channel is already several feet deep

and flowing fast.

As we got closer and closer,

I was just looking at how fast that water was going and I'm... You know,

they were in the worst possible place at the worst possible time.

They are five minutes away from not being able to stand on anything.

Trying to get the boat in position for the rescue.

The way the water was, there was a real risk the boat could have been

sucked into the pier, and if that had happened,

then we were all over the side, and that's not a place to be.

Helmsman Terry has to approach against the tide

and hold the boat steady with the power of the engine.

So close to the safety of the boat,

the stranded couple are still only one step from danger.

Our main concern was they didn't panic or anything

when they see the boat coming.

The worst thing they could do was start moving around

on the structure.

Or even jump into the water.

We don't want people to do that.

Some people jump in the water and they don't come back up.

They really had started to panic and you know, I remember,

even though we were telling them, "Stay where you are,

"stay where you are," they couldn't hear us, they weren't listening.

I suppose, for me, I realised just how scared they were then.

Lift your hand.

-Onto the nut.

-Come under?

-Come under, mate, that's it.

Get me hand?

Brilliant.

It was a remarkably quick rescue. You know? It was textbook.

Today, time was on the side of the lifeboat crew,

and two more lives have been saved from the Weston tides.

I think they definitely realised how lucky they'd been.

The amount of water that was running through that pier. If they had

let go, and they had got swept away, ten minutes longer,

could have been a different story.

You know, ten minutes later - that's one traffic jam

on the way to the lifeboat station -

that's all that is. They were incredibly lucky that day.

You know, there's a good feeling about the station when that happens.

We kind of linger.

You kind of don't want to go home.

You want to stay with the guys and you want to be...kind of together,

"Let's have another cup of tea, we'll have a cup of tea, shall we,

"before we go home? Yeah, we'll do that." It was one of those days.

It was a good day.

In the north-east, Hartlepool was once a fishing village.

There has been a lifeboat stationed here for over 150 years.

To keep it going, they are always on the lookout for new recruits.

So when you use that, would you take the bearing out and write it down?

18-year-old Kyle has recently signed up as a volunteer.

Before I started at the lifeboat, I had no experience at sea.

I'd maybe been on a boat once or twice on holiday, things like that.

Steve is in Norfolk. So if you click on...

-VOICEOVER:

-At the minute, I've got everything to learn, I suppose.

That will tell us how close we're going to get.

It's very hard with navigation and things like that.

It's crazy how much there is to learn.

Keep off the green. That's usually a good way of putting it!

If it's green, we don't want to go there.

I think I can cope quite well under pressure,

but I don't know if I'd be able to deal with something if I'd seen

something tragic, I don't think I'd be able to deal with that,

I don't think. I'm quite sensitive, I think.

A few hundred metres up the coast from the lifeboat station,

a dinghy has capsized.

Two men are stranded on the upturned hull.

One of the first to get kitted up with helmet-camera running is Kyle,

hoping to get picked for his first-ever shout.

Thank you. I hadn't actually been on a shout yet before that one,

so I was very keen on the way to get on there,

but I was a bit disappointed - I didn't think I was going to get on.

When we were getting ready for the shout,

there were a couple of new lads already kitted up.

Kyle was one of them.

I literally got two seconds of looking at him, saying, "Yeah, Kyle,

"grab a life jacket and helmet, you're coming."

I just thought I wasn't going to be going, so I panicked a bit.

Just after they launch, an urgent update comes in from the coastguard.

The two men are now off the boat.

One has managed to swim to shore and safety.

The other is struggling in the water.

When you hear a message like that, it always pricks your ears up,

so to speak, and you suddenly realise this is serious,

we've got to get there quickly.

With sea temperatures under 10 degrees,

survival time in the water could be as little as 15 minutes.

At the scene, just metres away...

..passers-by onshore are powerless to help the drowning man.

A passing boat has managed to get a lifeline to the casualty,

but under the barrage of waves, their engine cuts out.

For their own safety, they have to pull back.

The man's life is now in the hands of the Hartlepool crew.

Novice Kyle's first-ever shout is a race to get to him

before he succumbs to the sea.

People in the water, you tend not to take your new crew.

Certain jobs, you can't afford to have anybody dilly-dally around.

So you've got to be paying slightly more attention

to the new guy on the back.

Up ahead, they spot the casualty motionless in the water.

He's just feet away from being dashed onto the rocky shore.

Is that someone there, on your bow there?

Go-ahead, over.

-VOICEOVER:

-He wasn't moving.

Oh, my God.

I was definitely panicked when I seen him in the water.

And I seen... He didn't seem responsive.

I did have the thought that we've lost him, it's too late.

Your heart kind of sinks at that moment,

because you've got there as quickly as you possibly can,

you've done everything you possibly can to this point.

So it was quite a deflating moment, really.

Struggling to get the casualty onboard,

the crew realise he's tangled in the lifeline.

I had to cut the line. Straightaway,

because otherwise we wouldn't be able to pull him out.

I did sort of prepare myself for what we were going to do

when we pulled him out. I thought he was dead, I suppose.

-Kyle?

-Yep.

He looked dead to me.

It was very scary for a couple of minutes.

But when we'd actually managed to get him over onto the floor,

he made a couple of noises.

That was the big relief for me, when I heard him make a noise.

Are you all right, buddy?

The casualty is showing signs of life.

The crew need to get him to medical attention fast.

The two men are cousins.

They were testing repairs to the engine when they were picked up

by a wave and rolled over.

The casualty, Richard, stayed with the upturned boat,

while Jamie managed to swim to shore.

I didn't get really much chance to think about what was happening

at the time, it just went that fast, in a split second.

We were upside down and slammed into the water.

Capsized.

The water was instantly freezing.

I knew straightaway that we were not going to last long out there.

Richard was really, really

in a state of panic and shock at the time.

I wanted to get him on to the boat as quickly as possible,

get him into a safe place.

He was trying to keep hold of the boat, the waves were coming,

knocking us both off, and then I was having to get off, swim about,

get him onto the boat. Absolutely massive waves breaking off my back.

Once I got Richard secured to the boat,

the thoughts started going onto myself then,

bobbing about in the water, realising that my core temperature

was going to be vastly dropping.

Thoughts of my children going through my head, my grandchildren.

I am pretty much the centre of the family.

I have two deaf sons, one on the autistic spectrum.

And...I've got to provide for them, really.

Life basically flashed before my eyes

and I decided I was going to swim for it.

I told him just to keep hold of the boat, do not let go of the boat,

and he would be pretty safe, and that help was on the way.

And I knew I just had to get swimming

and try and get back to my wife and kids.

Really, really hard, one of the worst decisions

I've had to make in life.

It was a really hard thing to do.

Richard. All right, mate?

I know you are cold. We are going to try and get you off the boat,

all right?

It was after Jamie swam for shore,

believing he had left his cousin secure on the boat,

that waves swept Richard into the sea.

Have you got the...? Paramedic.

The paramedic is here.

Once Jamie left us, I tried keeping my eyes on him,

to watch him going towards the rocks,

but he went over two waves and I lost sight of him.

It was like, everything had gone.

It was just me.

It was just me against the sea.

I just felt like

I wasn't going to make it at that point.

I think my body shut down.

I can't even remember getting pulled aboard.

Apparently I was on both of the lifeboats that day.

I can't remember.

Are you ready? One, two, three.

I have always liked living,

but I like it a bit more now.

I have been thinking about what could have happened,

and I don't think Richard would have made it at all.

I don't know where I would have been able to put myself, I don't know

where I would be now. I wouldn't be in a very good place without him.

Just ten minutes after launching,

the crew hand over a recovering Richard to the ambulance team.

For Kyle, it's a shout he will never forget.

Where does this go? Back on here?

That day was great, to help save someone.

I suppose, if we weren't there,

I don't know how much longer he would have had.

On the way back, after we went out for the boat and came back in,

I thought I won't be able to do this on a day-to-day basis.

This type of pressure, but...after, it was great.

This is ours.

Kyle did brilliantly. He didn't flap,

he coped well with the pressure.

Is this the paramedic's?

Some crew members might wait months or even years to get a call-out

where they actually make a difference like this,

and for Kyle to get this as his first call-out,

I think it is absolutely fantastic how well he did.

Back in his day job, Kyle is a trainee accountant,

and his biggest deadline is the end of the tax year.

Kyle has joined an army of almost 5,000 volunteers,

from butchers to bakers and furniture makers,

willing to don the familiar yellow suit and transform themselves into

-life-savers.

-When the pager goes off, it flicks a switch,

I am a different person to the person I am when I am on the shore.

SIREN BLARES

You leave your everyday life at home, or at work or whatever,

and you head to do what you have to do.

You're a man on a mission.

You're a man on a rescue mission. Whatever way you want to look at it.

If somebody is absolutely helpless and you are there to help them...

WOMAN YELLS

Not like a superhero, I wouldn't say, but you feel like a hero

for a split second, I suppose.

My name is Jeff. We're here to take you home, all right?

Once you get back to the station, you realise, oh,

I actually helped somebody there, you know?

And you are proud, you walk and your head is a little bit higher,

your chest is a little more puffed out than it maybe normally is,

and you are walking past people who maybe look at you and think,

"What's he been up to? Why's he so proud of himself?"

And then you wander off back to the car and go back to your painting or

your office work or whatever you were doing before

the pager went on, and life then goes back to normal.

Stretching back 200 years,

switching from the day job to saviour of the high seas in seconds,

has been a way of life for the crews.

Dick Evans was a butcher who became

one of the most decorated lifeboat coxswains.

Dick was awarded two Gold Medals - the RNLI's Victoria Cross -

for his part in two daring rescues in hurricane-force winds.

In 1959, his crew saved eight seamen from the sinking ship Hindlea.

Eight years later, he helped rescue the crew

of stricken Greek vessel Nafisporos.

Today, keeping watch over the wild patch from which he helped rescue so

many, Dick's statue stands alongside his station, Moelfre,

on the Isle of Anglesey.

In Welsh, the name Moelfre means barren hill,

and the coastline here definitely lives up to its name.

Exposed windswept clifftops rise

from a shoreline of inaccessible rocks below.

We cover from Puffin Island here to the east of Anglesey,

right the way round the coast to the north, then round Point Lynas.

It's quite an exposed, dangerous stretch of coastline, really.

Sharp, jagged rocks,

but also it's exposed to the point where it's very deep water,

so you get tidal surges, it's short, choppy seas that catch people out.

We see a vast range of rescues and rescue situations.

It's always good to be challenged.

And the area we work in is a constant challenge

for various reasons - the wind, the tide, the weather.

But without a challenge, it would be a boring job, really.

When the pagers go off at dusk on a blustery winter's day,

the crew are on high alert.

SIREN BLARES

It was a cold evening, it was dark.

Normally, in the winter, when we have a shout,

you know it's going to be something serious.

Instantly you think, time of year, what could it be, where is it?

And, February time, there's not a great deal

of leisure traffic out there.

There's not a great deal of fishing going on at that time of year,

so it's an unknown.

I could see the discussions going on,

and I knew it wasn't a usual rescue.

Let's have a brief down there before we go, guys.

The crew have been called to a faller from one of the steepest parts

of the coastal path.

-Are you ready, Rob?

-When you're ready.

All they know is that it's a three-year-old female.

She's called Flossie.

And she's a Bichon Frise.

I've got my own dog, so I'd hate to see a dog hurt or injured.

So, yes, we wanted to get the dog out.

Speed to about 18 knots, yes?

18, 20 knots.

The adrenaline goes off, no matter what the shout is,

because things aren't predictable at sea.

We knew the dog was in Porth Wen,

which is a disused brickworks to the north of the islands.

Quite an exposed, treacherous bit of coast.

A nasty little bay, there's lots of big outcrops of rocks and wreaths.

But it was also falling light as well.

The cliff team weren't going to attempt a rescue

because it was quite a difficult stretch of cliffs.

So we were the only way that that dog was getting out.

-What was it called?

-Lassie.

Lassie? Just confirm, Lassie, over.

Flossie is not the crew's only concern.

When called to dogs in trouble,

it can be their owners who end up in most danger.

It's always in your mind, where are the owners,

what are they going to do, are we going to have to then rescue them

if they're going to try and do something silly?

OK, guys, just watch this come here, Mike.

Flossie's frantic family are up on the cliff edge,

over which she disappeared while out on an evening walk.

Looking over and seeing how far down the cliff went and not seeing her

initially, I must confess, I thought that we had lost her.

Big lump of rock here, Mike, come further out.

We looked down and we could actually see her at the bottom

of this 40-metre cliff. For me, it was like having a child go over.

It was incredibly, incredibly stressful.

It really did feel like it was part of the family that was in danger.

My first thought was, "Is there a way for me to get down to her?"

after realising there wasn't a way for her to get back up to us.

Come round to port, mate.

I didn't even give any thought to my own safety.

But it was my partner, she said,

"No, there's no way of getting down there."

Stay here, she will go and get help.

That prevented me from trying to get down the cliff.

-Engine off.

-40 metres below, the crew reach shore.

Now they need to find the casualty.

-You all right if I go up there, Mike?

-Yeah.

Vince takes the lead.

The dog had fallen about 40-odd metres, which is

about four double-deckers' worth in height. So it had fallen a good way.

Coastguard lights from the clifftop guide Vince in.

Suddenly he spots movement.

We could see the dog sat on a ledge probably ten or 15 foot up

from the beach. But it was quiet, it was kind of making me think,

yes, the dog's injured or the dog has hurt itself.

Hello, dog. Hello, doggy, there we are.

Hey, hey, hey.

You're always told, always approach a scared dog, don't put

your hand out, don't look at it directly, turn your back to it.

Give me a bit of backlight.

That dog doesn't know you, I don't know it,

I don't know its temperament.

But I'm wearing a big yellow and black drysuit with hi-vis

and I've got a helmet on, I've got gloves on,

it probably thinks it's an alien coming to rescue it,

not a lifeboatman or a human.

Hello, dog.

Hello, dog. Hello.

DOG YELPS

Hey.

Hey.

It was higher than us, so we had to kind of scramble up towards it.

And the last thing I wanted was a little angry Bichon Frise lunging

towards us, so it was a case of visors down, get the bag ready,

get your gloves on and just prepare.

There we are.

All right.

Anybody that is scared isn't going to behave or act

like they normally would.

I tried talking to it but... that's when I knew

there was going to be no way of convincing this dog

to come towards us.

YELPING AND GROWLING

It wasn't going to come nicely,

and it was trying to tell me who was boss.

It was a case of kind of doing the old ninja

and taking my chance when it turned away.

Ssh...

I wasn't going to hang around on the bottom of the cliff being told

what to do by a Bichon Frise.

OK, Derek, we've got the dog.

Just got to watch out now that he doesn't make a runner.

It's quite comfy in here.

I'm going to have to try and secure this bag a bit better, guys.

Don't tip that bag.

Just to confirm, we've got the dog in a bag here, safe and well.

Quite the opposite to friendly.

Probably had something to do with the face of the two we sent ashore,

but the dog is secure anyway. We'll meet you in the bay.

Those eyes are as if it wants to eat me.

CHUCKLING

Kept talking to Flossie in the bag,

kept popping her head down and making sure she was OK.

There we are, dog. Watch your fingers.

Gave off the odd growl, just to remind us she wasn't happy,

but I think she knew she was safe and she was with humans again.

How are we doing?

-Friendly(!)

-It's supposed to be friendly!

-CHUCKLING

After her ordeal,

a shaken but much happier Flossie is reunited with her family.

There we go.

Come on, darling.

-There we go.

-There you go, Flossie.

Friendly thing.

Once we let the dog out of the bag, it was fine,

it was like a completely different dog.

A bit friendlier now!

LAUGHTER

-Was she not so friendly?

-She's just scared.

Hello, dog. There we are.

She didn't bite you or anything, did she?

I felt terrible for him, and Claire, my partner,

she just, she was like, "That's not Flossie!" But, you know,

how would WE react in a situation

that was completely foreign to us and that stressful?

It might have just been the face, Derek.

If the RNLI hadn't come out, I do genuinely think I would have

been foolhardy enough to actually have tried to get down there.

There was no way on earth that we would have left her down there.

I didn't know what to say to them because I was just so,

so thankful for everything they had done.

Clear Coastguard, that's us back on slip and closing down.

Another life saved for the Moelfre crew.

Tonight, the only casualty was Vince.

Bichon Frise. Bit me.

Ooh!

The fishing town of Bridlington has had its own lifeboat since 1802.

For the last 114 years, it's lived here just off the high street,

a few hundred metres from the beach.

-ARCHIVE:

-The Bridlington lifeboat

is kept in what looks like a very big garage.

Whenever it has to go to sea,

it has to make the first part of the journey by road.

Cars and buses stop to let the lifeboat through.

Our station, it's a bit unique,

which is sadly going to come to an end.

Well, not sadly because we're getting a nice, shiny boathouse,

but it's going to be sort of end of an era,

that we're not going to be going down a main road

before we actually get the boat in the water.

I won't miss it, you know.

Health and safety nightmare.

It's not the only health and safety nightmare on their patch.

Flamborough Head, created by thousands of years

of coastal erosion,

is notorious for its unpredictable tide and currents.

No-one knows the risks around here

better than fisherman and Bridlington crewmember Steve.

His family have been fishing these waters for 300 years.

I will say the sea is in your blood.

If you are from the type of family that has had generations and

generations of men going to sea,

every one of them will tell you that the sea is in their blood.

For myself, coming from my background,

the way I perform at sea,

the way I think about the weather or the tide or the wind,

most of that is coming from my basic instinct

of what I've picked up over the last 50 years.

The tides are a huge factor around Flamborough Head,

because Flamborough Head sticks out into the sea

and disrupts the tidal flow.

The tide at any one time

can be running in several different directions.

For anybody that doesn't know the area,

they can soon find themselves from being in calm water

to very serious conditions.

They can soon find themselves in a seriously dangerous predicament.

When the Bridlington crew's pagers go off,

they are prepared for anything.

But when they are called out to help another lifeboat crew,

they know it's serious.

It's quite unusual for us to be called to something

that another lifeboat is already dealing with.

It was going through my head, what's gone wrong, what could be happening?

Three kayakers have got into trouble off the notorious Flamborough Head.

Flamborough's own lifeboat has rescued two of them.

The third is still missing.

The Bridlington boat has been called out to help in the search.

I wanted to get going pretty quick

because I knew we were going to run out of daylight.

It's been almost an hour since the 62-year-old kayaker was last seen.

The tide is going out and there are only a few hours of daylight left.

When we cleared Flamborough Head,

we started to encounter much larger waves.

It turned from flat, calm conditions

into quite serious conditions within a very short distance.

Considering the conditions that we were experiencing on the lifeboat,

we knew the kayaker was going to be struggling.

He was going to be in the water,

waves were going to be splashing over him.

Missing kayaker in bad weather - you could be looking for a fatality.

You might not even find them.

There's no sign of the kayaker near his last-known position.

The crew must decide their next move.

It was not a simple task.

Nobody was really sure where this guy might be.

Myself and Steve had a chat,

came up with a plan of what we were going to do.

And I said, "I think we should follow a track with the tide

"to the north because that's where I believe that he might have gone."

He won't have been able to get out of the ebb tide

because it is that strong.

He won't have been able to paddle against it or swim against it.

We set off on our search in a north-westerly course.

We were leaving the initial search scene by about two and a half miles.

Using Steve's nautical intuition,

the Coastguard and crew extend the original search zone.

We know as the job gets longer, then there's less chance finding him.

You're sort of wishing yourself, you know, "Come on,

"let's find him, let's find him. where are you, where are you?"

We were following the tidal stream down the coast and

he just weren't appearing, you kept thinking, "He will be here soon,

"he will be here soon," and he just wasn't.

After over an hour searching,

there's still no sign of the kayaker.

If Steve's hunch hasn't paid off, he may never be found.

The crew must decide either to push on or turn back.

My instinct was telling me, "Keep going, keep going, keep going."

Eventually we saw...

..a white object.

We thought, "Yes, there he is! Yeah, we found him."

We made full speed towards it.

We were on a little bit of a high,

called it into the Coastguards that we had seen something.

We were pretty positive until we arrived at the kayak.

The kayak was upside down.

No sign of the person.

And then when we got there and

he wasn't with it, it went from this massive high to this massive low.

We kind of knew that he had been with the kayak and holding on to it,

and when you start getting cold, you lose your grip

and probably just got to the point where he couldn't hold on any more.

The elements got the better of him, and he just physically couldn't.

The worst-case scenario is, yes, that he has drowned.

We are not going find anybody.

Has it gone from looking for a missing person to

are we going to be recovering a body, you know?

But we were straight back on it.

Because time was ticking on.

I asked for Filey lifeboat to be launched as well.

You know, let's start chucking stuff at this now.

We just need to find him.

Five miles up the coast,

another lifeboat is launched in the hunt for the kayaker.

I've never been involved in a search as big as that before,

that escalates so quickly.

The Coastguards were on the clifftop searching, binoculars.

The pressure built immensely at that time.

It's now become a major search operation with three lifeboats,

over 15 crew and several rescue teams on shore,

all searching for the missing kayaker.

It's very difficult to spot a person in the water.

You're looking for just their head, really.

Your eyes are straining.

You see a bit of debris floating, it's a person.

You see a bird sat there, it's a person.

And you've got to sort of shake your head a bit and think, no,

remember your training, that's not what a person looks like

in the water.

As the light begins to fade, the Coastguard radio with an update.

Somebody on the clifftop called the Coastguards and said,

they can see something white,

just quarter of a mile inside of where we were.

That gave us a bit of hope.

We couldn't see it from where WE were.

The weather was too bad.

At this stage, every possible sighting is followed up.

The Bridlington and Flamborough lifeboats

speed to where the white object has been seen.

You're wishing, "Let's hope it's him, let's hope it's him."

I spotted this little person. His hand sticking up in the air

and it was just like, "Oh, my God, he's there, we've found him."

We got alongside him, me and another lad grabbed him,

pulled him aboard and he was quite in a bad way.

It was the first time I've seen someone look that bad.

He wasn't far-off slipping away, I don't think.

Pick him up, then.

Is he on oxygen still?

He's on oxygen.

Exhausted, and suffering the effects of hypothermia,

missing kayaker Robbie is transferred

to Bridlington's bigger lifeboat to warm him up in the wheelhouse

and where he can be assessed by a paramedic.

We could see he was in a life-threatening situation.

After a casualty has been in the water so long,

even though you pull him out alive,

you still are a little bit dubious

about what he's been through while he's been in the water.

Is he at a point where he needs CPR?

Is he too far gone?

You just had to get the casualty onboard and assess him

and do what you can at that time.

I don't think he needs it any more, but if he does...

When we found that, I thought it would be an all-night job,

-once we got that empty.

-But he must have been able to see us,

and it must be the worst feeling in the world.

Watching us go across there.

After 20 minutes' warming up,

Robbie has recovered enough to be transferred to hospital

via the smaller lifeboat and ambulance waiting on shore.

When I saw him come aboard,

it was a guy that looked like he was fighting for his life.

When he came out the wheelhouse he was chatting with the crew,

he was a totally different person.

Not out of the woods, he still needed to go to hospital,

but he could walk off, you know, our lifeboat.

The captain of the rib, he says, I think the first thing he said was,

"Who's a lucky boy?"

Robbie's ordeal began after he was separated from his friends

and tried to paddle to the safety of shore alone.

And a big massive wave lifted me and just rolled me over.

That was it, I was out of the boat, and that's when reality hit.

Good luck, fella, anyway.

I just held on the boat.

And then I started being sick.

That kind of made me a bit dizzy.

Every time I was sick, then I could have quite easily let the boat go.

And I knew I shouldn't do that.

But eventually I was left with no boat.

-Lucky guy.

-Pardon?

-Very lucky guy.

There's no denying how lucky I was. I might have died that day.

I certainly think we can put that down to a life saved.

He's going home to his family tonight, and he could have

quite easily not been. So, yes, it was a good feeling.

Time and tide might wait for no-one,

but that day Steve helped beat them both.

A lot of what we did that day was down to Steve and his knowledge.

Yeah, he was invaluable that day.

Don't tell him.

When people ask you, "Why do you want to be a lifeboatman,

"why do you do it?"

Part of it is for moments like that when you know you have made

a difference, when you know that you have saved a life.

After helping rescue his fellow fishermen from the sinking trawler,

Darren is still coming to terms with the loss of the Ocean Way.

It was a good few days before it really sank in, pardon the pun.

It really hit home then just how bad it could have been, I guess.

At the moment, I'm not looking for a permanent job.

I'm happy just to take it easy.

As long as the bills are paid and we still get married, I'm happy.

And Flossie has bounced back from her 40-metre clifftop fall.

I was incredibly surprised that Flossie had no apparent injuries

on her at all. She just was muddy.

From her point of view, she just seemed as if she had been out

for a nice long walk over a field.

She just seemed to be completely herself

and as if nothing had happened.

You can't really get it wrong.

You can't take your time.

You just need to get there and get the job done.

Somebody that's been out for 17 hours isn't going to be good.

You are hoping for the best, but thinking about,

you know, the worst.