Hamble Lifeboat is an independent lifeboat operating in the central Solent. They are a completely volunteer based organisation, formed by locals in 1968 in response to a number of tragedies on and around the River Hamble. The Hamble Lifeboat ‘Ready To Launch’ Appeal 2021, which went live at midday on Tuesday 3rd August 2021, is aiming to raise £8000 to purchase new chart plotters for one of their lifeboats, the 'Harry Childs', prior to its relaunch back into service after a major refit.
The crew have almost completed a mammoth 3 year overhaul of the lifeboat to bring it up to the latest Rescue Boat Code of Practice standards, using their own spare time and knowledge to keep the costs as low as possible. The last piece of the jigsaw is to update the chart plotters to the latest touchscreen technology.
These will cost £8,000 to replace but are vital to ensure we can react quickly to coastguard taskings. The current plotters are old, and require multiple button pushes, which is not ideal when travelling at 35kts in a bumpy sea! We would like to replace them with the same as our other lifeboat, the ‘John and Violet Hurrell’. These are much more modern with state-of-the-art touch screen technology, allowing us to quickly input a search location or pattern when passed by the coastguard. They also allow us to overlay our radar image and AIS information, so we can easily see vessels names and identify our casualty vessels. These plotters will speed up our response times and ultimately, save lives. 2021 has been the busiest year to date for the Lifeboat, attending 77 coastguard incidents so far, an increase of over 25% on the number of incidents this time last year. The current in-service boat ‘John and Violet Hurrell’ is in need of its annual maintenance, so it is vital that the ‘Harry Childs’ is launched as soon as possible in order that we do not have to take time off service. If you can help us raise the £8,000 that we need to allow us to maintain our professional lifesaving service, please click on the link below to make your donation today:
https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/hamble-lifeboat-plotters-appeal For more information, contact fundraiser@hamblelifeboat.co.uk