Clacton Lifeboat Station Visit
11-05-08
Over the Easter Weekend 3rd Sudbury Sea Scouts took part in bag packing customers shopping at the Waitrose store in Sudbury for two days. The aim for one of those days was to raise £600 for new troop t-shirts for everyone in the troop to celebrate 60 years of 3rd Sudbury Sea Scouts. By the end of the day we had raised £900 so we decided to give to extra £300 to RNLI (Lifeboats).
As Sea Scouts are forever doing more water activities and increasing the size of our fleet of boats with the latest being a new Safety boat called Kingfisher and two new open boats we decided it was an excellent idea to give the money to the Lifeboats.
The Lifeboats is a charity and made up of volunteers who have day time jobs like me and you and when there is a emergency call like there is a fire onboard a boat they will get paged and stop what stop what they doing, From that point onwards at Clacton they have 8 minutes to the Station and get out to sea. The Lifeboats rely on purely donations from the general public as well as fundraising themselves and fundraising done by other people like us.
We chose Clacton lifeboat Station because we operate off Brightlingsea on many of our Scouting activities and the Station does cover the Brightlingsea area and in very unlikely event we got into trouble we would call the coastguard and they would send out the Lifeboat out from Clacton.
On Sunday 11th May 2008 three Sea Scouts, myself and Rob (the Sea Scout Leader) went to Clacton to present the lifeboat crew with a cheque for £300 which they very pleased to receive. We also had a tour of the Station which has two lifeboats, a training room and a control room.
Special thanks go to the Waitrose Staff for letting the Sea Scouts bag pack, the Waitrose Customers for giving generously and the Clacton lifeboat crew for giving us a excellent tour of their Station
For more information what Clacton Lifeboats do you can visit their website at http://www.clactonlifeboat.co.uk/
James Duncan
3rd Sudbury Assistant Sea Scout Leader.