Bay Harbour: April 04, 2018

Wednesday April 4 2018
Latest Christchurch news at www.star.kiwi
BAY HARBOUR
PAGE 7
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Fire rages, homes at risk
Big swells put Sumner Lifeboat to the test
• By Sarla Donovan
SIZEABLE SWELLS resulted
in a busy past few months for
the Sumner Lifeboat coastguard
service.
Following a quiet end to
2017 and between Christmas
and New Year, coxswain Blair
Quane said call numbers picked
up markedly with a number of
operations between January and
March.
One call-out on February 1
involved three separate incidents
happening at the same time, after
a big southerly change came
through and a “massive off-shore
wind” got several people into
trouble.
First a boogie boarder was
caught in a rip by the station
headquarters.
At the same time, a kite surfer
off Scarborough Beach got into
trouble and had to release his
kite which flew off “halfway to
the Chatham Islands,” said Mr
Quane.
“We had to take one of the
boats out pretty much to the
horizon to get his kite because
we kept getting calls from people
on the hills saying ‘there’s something
out there that looks like a
yacht in trouble’.”
SKILLED: The Sumner Lifeboat headquarters during a recent
operation.
Simultaneously, a catamaran
in the Avon-Heathcote Estuary
flipped over and everybody on
board fell out.
“We were all hands on deck.”
A week-long search for
14-year-old Jack Sutton was one
of the biggest the lifeboat had
ever been involved in, with 93
vessels searching from Waimairi
to Lyttelton Harbour.
Jack was swept out to sea after
getting caught in a rip off Sumner
Beach on February 5.
His body was found washed
up on the foreshore on February 12.
Sumner Lifeboat has about
40 active voluntary crew, along
with reserve crew and three paid
part-time staff members. It costs
about $200-$250,000 a year for
wages, crew gear, vessel maintenance,
fuel and operational
outgoings.
The boat can often be spotted
heading offshore on Tuesday
evenings – training night.
“Sumner is quite a unique
unit for coastguards; it does a
lot of its work within the surf,
whereas Coastguard Canterbury
and Waimakariri-Ashley are
predominantly offshore or doing
river work.”
“We need skippers to be able
to helm the boat in pretty atrocious
conditions. A lot of the
time, if there’s a really big surf
BIG WAVES: Sumner Lifeboat trainees practice driving the
boat in large swells and putting out fires on the breakwater. ​
on you’ll see the boat go out and
spend an hour or so out there.
The guys are just getting used to
driving the boat in the surf. Now
we’re coming into winter so we
start moving into night operation
stuff where we’re driving in
the dark, practising navigating
into the estuary, being able to
identify landmarks in the dark
and use gear like the radio and
GPS when it’s dark.”
It takes a year of training
before a new volunteer can crew
on a call-out.
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