Coastguard – Hats off to dedicated crew

The weather that was promised certainly delivered with light winds and sunny hot days which meant that the Waitemata Harbour was boiling with activity over the Christmas and New Year periods. 

Our Coastguard unit was kept extremely busy and was out on the water from December 26 through to January 14 every single day – that’s 20 days in a row! There was an average of four people on the boat with an average day of seven hours on the water – more than 560 hours that our crew has given to our community to keep people safe on our waters which I think is impressive. 

Add another 150 hours of off water activities, and it shows that we have an extremely dedicated crew of 40.

In the first two weeks of January, Coastguard Hibiscus attended 29 incidents and used over $5000 worth of fuel. In amongst that we have also been fundraising by attending events selling Coastguard Lottery tickets. This is one of our main sources of funding to pay for training, fuel and equipment to keep our crew up to speed and safe. 

We are still waiting for our vessel, Hibiscus Rescue One to have the refit completed. Our best laid plans of having her back by Christmas didn’t happen due to further work needing to be completed, so we were lucky to be loaned a ‘bailment’ vessel by Coastguard NZ. These vessels were part of the Americas Cup Campaign and were afterwards donated by NZ Lotteries to Coastguard NZ. This allowed our unit to continue out on the water.  

Most incidents we attend have excellent outcomes where both people and vessels are returned safely back to shore. However, on January 1 our volunteers were paged urgently to look for a person in the water. This is not the sort of page you want to get, but our dedicated crew were on the vessel and out of the marina within 20 minutes from receiving the page. I am incredibly proud of the crew in the actions that were taken by them, and the professionalism shown. These incidents are luckily few and far between, however again our crew was paged urgently again on January 14 at 9pm for a similar incident and similar outcome. 

We are always looking for new recruits to join our unit so if you want to come and see what we are all about then feel free to email me at the address above and we can have a chat. We are always looking for people for a variety of roles. If you prefer to be land based, then we also have roles to support our unit.

Stay safe out there and give us a wave if you see our crew out there.