I’m from Rosses Point. I grew up beside the sea and spent all my youth playing on shorelines and messing about in boats.
When I was about five or six, two of my uncles built a boat from scratch. Them being teenagers and me being a kid, they were my heroes. It was probably what gave me a huge fascination with boats.
When I did go and do sailing lessons, I think I failed my Level 1. I don’t know why, maybe they didn’t like the cut of my gib. I think, I was too used to mucking about.
Getting involved in the RNLI was just serendipity really. We had just moved back to Rosses Point from Galway, our two children were very small and a notice went up in the local pub saying a lifeboat station was opening and anyone who was interested, please attend a meeting.
I thought, I can make sandwiches and tea, they are going to need someone to do that. When I walked in the door of the meeting, they said, “Oh, sure, you’ll be crew anyway.” I was like, “Me, really?” It was kind of as unintentional as that to be honest.
My kids were aged four and five when I got involved. This is my big thing about the lifeboats – I could do it because of the community around me. There is nothing solo about the lifeboats.
I knew that if the pager went off and I had to go out on the boat, the kids came down to the station with me and stayed with whoever else was there. They were all neighbours and friends. My children grew up understanding that when you are part of a community, that’s what you do. You muck in when you are needed.
I was coming from a completely informal background – literally messing about in boats – but in hindsight, an awful lot of the safety stuff was drilled into us. It is sort of inherent in a seafaring community that safety is number one.
I didn’t know how to drive a boat with a steering wheel, I didn’t know any of the formal techniques so it was quite daunting. I had to learn the formal procedures. The basic skills and familiarity was there already. It seemed huge but I took to it really easily.
We had a long history of support and fundraising for the lifeboats locally but life saving here would have been locals going out in their own boats to help anyone who was in trouble. Now, I was part of this formal organisation with training and a boat that was capable. All of a sudden, things got safer.
When people talk about bravery, the bravery would have been people going out in craft that weren’t necessarily appropriate for the conditions but it was all they had.
In 1998, I became helm. I am one of six helms of the 25-30 lifeboat crew now.
For the first couple of years, there was a padlock on the door and I’d get down and I had so much adrenaline running through me, I wasn’t able to get the key into the padlock. But, that has changed and settled over the years.
Now, there is a little routine that I go through in my head: have I got socks – there is nothing worse than going into the wellies and the dry suit without socks on. You could be five hours with no socks in a pair of wellies. That’s no craic.
With experience, you learn that when the pager goes off, you need to get there as quickly as possible but the way to do that is very steadily. You can’t let the adrenaline take over. I don’t find I have to manage the emotional side of it. You are there, very focused to do a specific job. Your task is to save lives at sea so when you get in the boat, you are very task-driven.
Maybe there are times afterwards when you are dwelling on things, something will come back to you and that is when you have to process whatever it is you have dealt with on the water.
You never turn your back on the sea, that’s what I’ve always been told
There is a full network of people who know what has been going on, who know that you have been out. There is always a lot of support and people to chat things over with.
Things that stick in my memory? There are plenty. The things that immediately spring to mind are some of the most beautiful nights where I have had the opportunity to be in places where nobody else would ever get the chance to be, on a glorious starry night, with a flat calm sea and no emergency, a false alarm of some sort.
There have been some very rough conditions at times. Some calls of very high concern where you are really worried about somebody who you know is in immediate danger. They are very important but they are not the day-to-day.
It is very embedded in me that, number one, I am a volunteer. I can volunteer to go out and I can turn around and go home at any point. As a helm, my first responsibility is the safety of myself and the crew. I have to look around at the people on the boat who are neighbours and family and whose wives and husbands and kids are part of my life as well. Would you put that person in a dangerous position? That stops me from putting myself in a dangerous position.
Nobody goes out being deliberately stupid. Nobody goes out to get into trouble. I never have any issue going out to people regardless of how they got themselves into it. You’ve got to remember as well, we are very rightly restricted in what weather conditions we can launch into so if someone does something really silly in really bad conditions, then we can’t help. We are not a magic wand.
You also have to remember that all we want to do is to go and help – it’s probably one of the most difficult decisions that we have to make to not.
You never turn your back on the sea, that’s what I’ve always been told. You can look at all the forecasts, you can be educated and intelligent about it and something can still catch you off guard.
If you are used to the sea, you will listen to your gut and, very often, that tells you, before any conscious thought, that there is something not quite right.
Yes, the pager goes off an inopportune times – the dinner is going to be ruined and you just have to turn everything off and run. Sometimes you have to drag yourself off in the middle of the night. You find yourself at the lifeboat in your pyjamas.
Everyone in the household is raised to the pager going off. When the pager goes off in that Saving Lives at Sea programme on TV, the dog will jump up and look at me and go, “Why are you not going? Come on, move.”
I’ve always worked, more or less, full-time and whole time. The lifeboats then, to some extent, became my social life and my downtime. The variety of people that I have met and all the training that I did was fundamental in giving me the confidence to try other things.
I returned to college as a mature student when my children started college. Recently, I got a doctorate in environmental studies. I’m working on a Postdoc now.
I’ve probably got more from the lifeboats than I have given. The reward for me is that camaraderie and kinship with my neighbours and friends, the ability to do something useful which we would probably be doing anyway but now, we are just doing it more safely. – In conversation with Joanne Hunt
