It’s always good to get the boat out in a range of conditions so we launched on Saturday in some pretty blustery conditions for a bit of rough weather training. The wind was blowing a force 5, gusting 6, and the sea state was probably best described as “a bit lumpy.”
In difficult conditions we can’t always be certain that we can recover the boat in Hope Cove. Instead for a rescue in difficult conditions we might launch, recover to a safe harbour nearby, most probably Salcombe, and then return to Hope Cove by road. So we took the boat along the coast to explore the conditions at sea, and practice a Salcombe recovery.
It was a very wet ride to Salcombe for boat and crew with waves of 3-5m, and it certainly put our drysuits though their paces as you can see from the video. There’s a particularly big wave at about 30 seconds in. We were out for about an hour so as you can probably imagine, the boat and our kit needed a good wash afterwards.
For those who are interested, we shot the footage on a gopro mounted to the console of the lifeboat. We had image stabilisation turned on, which is why the horizon stays pretty steady in the footage. It didn’t feel quite like that on board!