Saving Lives at Sea

September 5, 2007 2:21 PM

Join the volunteers and become a virtual crewmember of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution by downloading the desktop pager. The pager can be set to monitor all stations in the UK and Ireland or just specific stations. If you had it running in 2006 it would have gone off 8377 times (PDF).
posted by TwoWordReview (8 comments total)

I'm a former volunteer, hopefully when you see that pager go off you spare a thought for the men and women who have to go out into the seas around the UK and Ireland at all times and in all conditions, by choice.

Oh, and if you feel like donating, it's for a good cause!
posted by knapah at 2:26 PM on September 5, 2007

People fall off their boats that often? ... ?
posted by blacklite at 2:36 PM on September 5, 2007

and their inflatable beach toys get blown out to sea, or their jetskis malfunction... and so on ad nauseam.
posted by knapah at 2:53 PM on September 5, 2007

1. Install desktop thingy
2. ???
3. Save lives at sea!
posted by mendel at 3:48 PM on September 5, 2007

People fall off their boats that often? ... ?

Sometimes their boats fall over. Sometimes nobody's quite sure what happened, but the lifeboat has to pick up the pieces. Sometimes people die just like that and there's nothing anyone can do about it. It's been a weird summer.
posted by Lebannen at 4:56 PM on September 5, 2007

As a kid I saw my uncle and his fellow lifeboatmen set out in the small hours into a freezing, pitch-black, unbelievable, howling hell of a night in response to a distress call. Then and now, I am astonished and humbled by these men's heroism.

Volunteers.
posted by Joeforking at 5:07 PM on September 5, 2007

There's a pretty cool advert here for the RNLI. There's a few videos aswell of the guys at work, launching for rescues and stuff such as this one showing exactly the type of danger these guys put themselves in to save lives every time they launch!
posted by TwoWordReview at 5:27 PM on September 5, 2007

You can even help support the RNLI (by a whole 4p per box!) by drinking tea.
posted by Quinbus Flestrin at 9:10 PM on September 5, 2007